Harnessing Personality Profiles For Talent Pairing And Team Building

A comprehensive approach to talent management

I will never tell anyone that talent pairing is easy. Doing so effectively requires you to delve into the details of each open position and each candidate to discover what makes each one tick, the work they do best, and the tasks they enjoy most. Then, you can match your clients to the virtual assistants or other employees in your organization with the skills, values, and training they need.

To achieve this, your company needs to develop a value-based personality assessment to screen each applicant. In a hiring role, such an assessment allows you to screen job candidates and get a sense of whether they'll be a good fit for your company culture. When pairing internal talent with new roles and responsibilities, these assessments help you match employees to the most fulfilling work they can perform and ensure teams work together as effectively as possible. 

 

Identify the Right Talent for a Job with Personality Profiles

Personality profiles are the first step in focusing your talent search. Today, technological advances and remote workplace environments enable you to take advantage of a global talent pool. If your company leverages work-life counterbalance, geographic flexibility, and a hybrid workplace environment to attract top talent, you will likely have a steady stream of applicants. In fact, according to Distribute Consulting, employers who advertise remote jobs see applications increase by approximately 3,000%.   

A full interview roster is a blessing and a curse. As you scan through hundreds or thousands of applications, the bullet points on those resumés begin to blur, so it helps to have more precise criteria to narrow the pool. 

Personality profiles enable you to see at a glance who is best suited for a role and who will enjoy the work most. For example, if you are looking for an administrative position, you will focus on finding candidates who are more task-oriented and efficient at multitasking. If you need an enthusiastic salesperson or customer representative, keep your focus on outgoing and open candidates. 

With personality assessments, you can screen for people who will be analytical, detail-oriented, team players, or good communicators much faster than you can with traditional resumés or interviews alone. This, in turn, helps you streamline the talent pairing process once a candidate’s onboarding process is complete.

Design More Effective Interviews with Personality Assessments 

After narrowing your talent pool, personality profiles enable you to hone your interview process. The more thorough your interviews are, the more insight they uncover about your candidates.

Resumés can shed light on work experience and skill sets, but effective interviews dig deeper. In addition to crafting questions about your candidate's experience, word your questions in such a way that enables you to uncover more details about their character and soft skills, such as emotional intelligence and communication.

Personality profiles help you identify specific questions to ask. Rather than running down a list of generic interview questions, you can meet candidates with questions individually tailored to their personalities. This ensures that you receive an accurate sense of each candidate and how they will fit into your organization's culture before onboarding. Essentially, managers who ask the right questions find the right candidates.

Create Stronger Teams with Personality Profiles 

As you begin to pair talent with groups and individuals, you can use personality profiling to find people who complement each other's strengths and weaknesses and build productive teams. This allows you to best balance conflicting personalities across teams and departments to ensure each pairing can work together seamlessly.

For example, some of your applicants may be driven by the need to achieve order, routine, and structure in their work, while others are motivated by a desire to acquire knowledge, learn, and grow. As you pair candidates and clients, you must match their motivations to make their work as effective as possible.

Improve Company Culture with Personality Profiles 

The most successful companies have clear values and strong cultures and align their employees around those values. The best way to do this in your organization is by using personality profiles as part of your hiring process.

Personality profiles help you to pair people who are the best fit with each other, the responsibilities of their role, their managers, and their supervisors. This ensures new hires come eager to contribute to the team and the company's mission from day one onboarding. 

Boost Retention with Personality Profiles 

Many companies struggle to attract suitable candidates — even those with a strong recruitment process can end up with employees who don't fit into the company culture. For example, you may hire someone who has the skills for a job but doesn't mesh well with other members of your team. This leads to unhappy employees who feel undervalued, which can subsequently lead to higher turnover rates.

Personality profiling helps you attract the right people to your company and ensure they stay. Before hiring, these assessments enable employers to accurately think through the responsibilities of a job and identify the traits that make up their ideal candidate profile. 

Before the interview process begins, be sure to advise your clients to touch base with every candidate in the pool. In this short meeting, they define their expectations for the role and address the qualities they are looking for in a virtual assistant. A thorough understanding of the work ahead enables both parties to enter the partnership with clear expectations. Working relationships are far more likely to succeed when parties talk through responsibilities. 

While the process of creating and implementing a personality profile may seem like a lot of work, the ROI is worth the time and resources this will require. As a result, you will hire better employees, develop stronger teams, improve company culture, and boost retention rates. 

The bottom line is that personality profiles help you attract and retain the best people for your company. And when you have the right team in place, your business can thrive in any market.

Gerlie Corachea is the Director of Talent Pairing at Cyberbacker.