Employee recruitment and retention are undoubtedly the two biggest problems HR professionals face. With limited information and time, it can feel impossible to make many of the connections needed to keep current employees happy and find the best candidates to fill open positions.
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One of the most important things HR professionals can do to improve the problems they’re experiencing is to work on their communication. Whether you’re looking to make an important hire, train new employees, or connect with other team members, it’s important to understand others’ communication preferences in order to communicate in an empathetic, effective way.
The best way to do this is to get to know their personality. By having other people take a short personality assessment, you can learn a lot about them, including their natural strengths, motivations, communication style, and more. When communicating with people is your job, these insights offer a lot of value. For HR teams, the more you understand people, the easier it is to pick the right candidate for each position, train and onboard new hires, and resolve internal conflict.
Make Good Hires
Finding the best fit for a job is tricky, especially when you have to find the right candidate in a short time frame. It takes more than just a list of past experiences to help you figure out who’s best for each role, which is where personality assessments come in handy.
If you have more insight into a candidate’s personality, including what comes naturally to, energizes, and drains the person, you can better understand how well he or she would fit in a certain role. Understanding personality can help you find better candidates, ask better interview questions, and hire the best people for each position. By learning more about them through personality insights, you can reduce some of the stress and frustration involved in the recruiting process.
Once you find the right person, personality insights can help you communicate with him or her effectively. You’ll have an easier time talking to candidates and convincing them to join your team when you have a good idea of how they like to communicate.
Reaching back out or discussing salary and benefits with the help of personality insights is a breeze. With the help of personality, you’ll be able to find the best people for the job.
Training and Onboarding
When you have a better understanding of personality, you can also improve the onboarding process for new hires. Even if you’re using a standard slide deck, you’ll be able to customize the discussion to keep everyone engaged.
For example, if you know that some new hires are more independent and learn best on their own, you can give them their needed space and focus on using written communication to teach them rather than group presentations. On the other hand, those who are more social and engaging may be better suited for talking through everything they’re learning.
Personality knowledge also helps prevent miscommunication with new hires. Rather than potentially confusing their introversion for coldness or extroversion for intrusiveness, having access to personality insights can help you see their personality traits for what they truly are. They’ll be able to catch on quickly, and you’ll be able to understand their perspective.
Resolve Internal Conflict
No matter what position you’re in, you’re bound to experience conflict with a colleague at some point. It just happens when you work closely with other people. However, resolving interpersonal conflict becomes much easier when you have a better grasp of how others tend to think and communicate.
Conflict tends to stem from miscommunication, so understanding personality can put you and your team in a place of advantage. You’re able to better recognize, and even appreciate, the natural differences between two people and pinpoint where miscommunication may be happening, which can help resolve issues in a quick and painless way.
Modern HR Teams
Personality influences nearly everything we do, from the career paths we pursue to the people we befriend. Making an effort to utilize personality insights is essential for every modern HR team.
By working to learn more about the personality of those around you with a personality test, your team can become more effective and empathetic. You’ll be able to efficiently find the best candidates, easily build a great onboarding experience, and effectively work through internal conflict.
| Drew D’Agostino and Greg Skloot are CEO and President, respectively, of Crystal, an app that tells you someone’s personality. Using artificial intelligence (AI), Crystal accurately identifies a person’s motivations, communication style, and other behavioral traits. D’Agostino and Skloot are also coauthors of Predicting Personality: Using AI to Understand People and Win More Business, a book published by Wiley on November 19, 2019. |