How does "Personality" play a role in the field of Recruitment?

"When working in the field of recruitment one cannot avoid coming across the field of personality and how it affects the recruitment process.

Personality is not an unimportant factor, but it is not the most important one.

The word personality comes from the Latin "persona", which means: A character in a play, an actor's mask and a human being.

In other words, "personality" is not really the person himself, but what most people will see (the "mask") when they meet that individual.

It can be manners, style, the way he or she handles certain situations, reactions to stress, handling of people, attitudes towards different types of opposition, and so on.

It all comes together in a package that we could call "personality".

A common mistake is to believe that a test can describe who someone really is because that "someone" is a totally unique being who is capable of thinking, dreaming, visualising, creating, making decisions, planning, etc.

In fact, each and every one of us is totally individual and that "uniqueness" cannot be measured in any personality test.

You may like music or you may be good at writing lyrics and that is something that will give a kind of picture of you even if it does not even vaguely describe the totality of your person.

If you like a certain sport or flowers or prefer to create art, these are all factors that are far removed from what a personality test can measure.

Whether you build empires or are determined to be able to repair your car is not visible in a personality test either, because the size and type of game you get involved in has a lot to do with you and, again, that cannot be measured in any personality test.

What can be measured is how or in what way you do things.

Imagine the artistic painter who is painting a landscape. Whether or not you will like the quality of that painting is not something we can test by looking at the painter's personality chart, but how he will handle the actions and problems of painting and how things are done can be assessed by looking at his personality.

Is he a perfectionist?

Does he like to work fast?

Does he tend to try new things or is he conservative?

Does he tend to stop before the painting is finished?

These are all questions that a good personality test can give you a decent answer to.

A Great Article by Marten Runow, CEO and founder of Performia international.