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Briah Handa-Oakley06.08.20215 min read

Importance of Hiring the Right Personality - And How AI Can Help

Have you ever been put into a team, where everyone's personalities seemed to collide, and no one could agree with each other and come to one solid conclusion? Have you ever been with a co-worker where your personalities just didn't seem to "click", or maybe you've felt like your own personality didn't quite match the work environment and culture? Whether you've experienced it first-hand or not, having the right employee's with the correctly aligned personality traits can make or break a company's success.

Unfortunately for firms, not all recruiters have the ability of reading into someone's personality as well as they'd like to.

Adding artificial intelligence systems into the human recruitment process has proven to allow recruiters to gain further insight into candidates, from deeper understanding of their personality to understanding the qualities and missions that resonate with them. With the aid of machine learning, recruiters during the hiring process can succeed to gain a deeper understanding through analysing the data and ultimately help them hire the personality that fits for the role within the company.

Unposed group of creative business people in an open concept office brainstorming their next project.-2

Importance of Personality for Company Success - Why does Personality Matter at Work?

Achieving a diverse workforce is becoming increasingly important for firms. Particularly in recent years, diversity and inclusion have been highlighted topics, as racial inequality and injustice came to the world centerstage.

Companies are not only realising the responsibility they have, but also the value that a diverse work environment brings to them. Global firms including Coca-Cola, Oracle and JPMorgan Chase are among many that have funds to manage diversity, in hopes to create a more inclusive workforce, increase retention rates, and build long-term relationships with their employee's.

Each one of us has a unique combination of the "Big Five" personality dimensions – extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience. There is no "right" or "wrong" personality, and there sure isn't one specific personality that will thrive in a workplace.

Through the process of understanding a person's personality, it provides recruiters with further information about the candidate, i.e. their mission and vision in life, what they stand for etc. A person's personality has the ability of helping an organisation reach its goal effectively - but it can also inhibit teams to reach their goals efficiently if employee's are unable to work well together.

How effectively a work task will be carried out will heavily depend on the balance between the personality dimensions and what drives the candidate. Some specific traits will be more important elements, and will be the make or break between whether they will lead a successful organisation. Ideally, recruiters want to employ candidates whose goals align with the company and position they want to have filled.

Multi ethnic group of succesful creative business people using a laptop during candid meeting-1

How AI Can Help You Hire the Right Candidates

Have you ever met someone for the first time, and noticed that their personality changed once you got to hang out with them a few more times? Getting to know someone usually takes time, and often recruiters are unable to really get to know the candidates which they interview in the short amount of time they have.

It may take several interviews for a hiring manager to really see how the person works and what drives them, and even then, the limitations of the interview situation mean that recruiters don’t necessarily get to see under the hood until the candidate has already started their new job. At that point, a hiring mistake becomes painfully clear.

Recruiters are under time pressure to screen hundreds, often thousands of candidates for a job position - how can they analyse each and every candidate fairly during an interview, and find the right fit for a role?

Thankfully, there is a new technology that unlocks a way to learn about someone’s personality without an assessment - personality artificial intelligence AI. The goal of personality AI is simple - to go beyond the candidates work experiences and interview answers, and analyse whether the candidate is the right fit based on their personality.

The AI works in a similar way to our brains - just at a much, much faster rate, of course. AI can analyse candidates speech, gestures and micro-expressions, collect data based on candidates' online presence, and assess these large amounts of data to generate personality insights.

Image of two succesful business people conducting an interview to hire their next employee

Narrowing the Candidate Pool with AI

We already know that AI tools are the ultimately way for recruiters to save time during their screening processes - AI driven ATS can help source the best candidate pool for resume screening and find quality talent for companies, without compromising on speed or quality. To the relief of hiring managers, AI and ,machine learning tools are allowing recruiters to save time on the low-value, high-volume recruiting tasks that continue to monopolise their time and attention, and focus on building genuine connection s with candidates.

Image of two succesful business people conducting an interview to hire their next employeeHowever, that's not where it stops. AI can help recruiters make more calculated decisions that are backed by data from the AI. Machine learning can add new data to recruiters intuitive readings of a candidate's personality, and thus help narrow down the candidate pool and help them find the better fit for the role.

Unposed group of creative business people in an open concept office brainstorming their next project.-1

AI Will Enhance Human capabilities - NOT replace Them

In the end, recruiting is a human industry.

As AI continues to develop and create a way to automate elements of the recruiting process, it’s important to remember that it was never designed to replace the human interaction that is essential to successful recruiting.

So, while we can allow AI tools to automate elements of the recruiting process with distinct inputs and outputs like screening, sourcing and assessment, personality AI should be used as a tool for recruiters to enhance interpersonal communication.

As they do this, recruiters can gain a deeper understanding of their candidates, which they couldn't usually do during the time frame of a typical interview. When candidates have a better understanding of what drives and motivate their candidates, they will be able to find the better-fitted candidate for the role.

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Briah Handa-Oakley

Conducting in-depth content strategy at the intersection between artificial intelligence and L&D. I cover emerging technology and the latest advancements in AI technology and ultimately fuse technical knowledge with storytelling skills.

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