Revised and updated Oct. 27, 2020

Smart leaders understand how powerful having different personality types in the workplace can be. Personality tests like Myers-Briggs and Enneagram can measure a person’s specific personality traits in multiple ways. Many companies have begun using these evaluations to help them better understand potential and current employees, providing them with valuable insights they may not have obtained any other way.

As with all approaches, however, there are a number of positives and negatives to using personality tests. To help us understand the extent to which employers should rely on personality tests for their recruitment or employee development efforts, we asked 13 entrepreneurs from Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) the following question:

What’s one pro or one con for using personality tests for recruiting and/or developing employees? Why?

Pro: They serve as great conversation tools

Personality tests are not a one-size-fits-all tool to identify and recruit employees, but they can be great conversation tools for existing and new staff. When used in addition to staff training and growth tools, personality tests can serve as a tool to discuss aspects of your team members’ behavior or their sense of self, helping them to open up and discover more about themselves. —Darby Cox, Darby Cox LLC

Pro: They can help match people to jobs they’d enjoy

Personality tests can be extremely beneficial in the hiring and development process for employees. I’ve found the DISC personality test to be beneficial for matching people with jobs they’d enjoy and likely be successful at. It also allows you to communicate with others more effectively, as it gives you a better understanding of how people process information. —Kevin Getch, Webfor

 

Pro: They can eliminate unqualified candidates

I think that you can use personality tests when recruiting employees, but that’s about it. Red flag questions on the test can help you eliminate people who are not qualified, which helps you save time and money. You’ll also improve the chances of hiring someone who will fit into their new role. —John Brackett, Smash Balloon LLC

 

Pro: They may offer better perspective on past experiences

Personality tests are useful in hiring because they can test what people will do in specific situations, so you can get a true perspective on their past experiences. Candidates will tell you great stories about how they handled certain situations, but a personality test will give you better insight into why they behaved that way since most people can’t fake their responses. —Josh Kohlbach, Wholesale Suite

Pro: They can identify how employees can be integrated into the team

Understanding how someone operates best is just as important as the education and skill set they carry. The Gallup CliftonStrengths assessment is a great test to gauge where a candidate stands in their natural state and how they will integrate into your existing team. It can be used to identify what candidates and personalities will fill gaps in the company culture that you might have. —Matthew Podolsky, Florida Law Advisers, P.A.

Pro: They may be more relevant to an employee’s inner self

I think personality tests are interesting and possibly useful, but they are also limited, especially when it comes to the workplace. They are fairly abstract and probably indicate more about an employee’s inner self and potential than how someone is actually going to perform on a day-to-day basis. You can use them, but also look at more measurable factors, such as what people have actually done. —Kalin Kassabov, ProTexting

Other Articles From AllBusiness.com:

• The Complete 35-Step Guide for Entrepreneurs Starting a Business
• 25 Frequently Asked Questions on Starting a Business
• 50 Questions Angel Investors Will Ask Entrepreneurs
• 17 Key Lessons for Entrepreneurs Starting A Business

Con: They are not a final testimony of character

The important thing to remember with the Myers-Briggs or Enneagram tests is that they are not ironclad reports that give you a final testimony of a person’s character. They are meant to help you understand what a person’s preferences are. This will enable you to help people find work and tasks that they’ll love to do, which will help you create a great workplace with high productivity. —Syed Balkhi, WPBeginner

Con: They could set employers up to be biased

I think a significant con of using personality tests for recruiting is it sets you up to be biased. You may attribute a candidate’s behavior and words to what the test says, rather than actively listening to people. It’s important to be aware that you could misjudge a person. Keep an open mind and rely on your experience to help you understand a candidate’s fit with your business. —Blair Williams, MemberPress

Con: It’s possible they will generate false positives

I don’t like personality tests because they’re not always accurate and often measure a person’s state of mind at the time they take the test. Many people aren’t comfortable during the hiring process, so you’re getting a false positive. If you insist on using these tests, make them only one factor in your hiring decision. —Thomas Griffin, OptinMonster

 

Con: They risk pigeonholing employees to generic norms

A personality test pigeonholes employees to standards and norms that apply to a trend of people, but should not be used to judge the individual. The risk with these tests is that we seek to derive too much data about a person, and instead they should just be an indicator as to strategies and ways to manage and motivate individuals to improve. They should be used to provide a guiding checkpoint and start more conversation. —Nicole Munoz, Nicole Munoz Consulting, Inc.

Con: They fail to sum up an individual as a whole

The main con of using a personality test is that it fails to sum up an individual as a whole. People are complex and it takes more than a test or a few tests to understand what they would be like to work with. You’re better off contacting their references to get the most accurate, current information about how they are in the workplace. —Jared Atchison, WPForms

 

Con: They don’t truly show if an employee is a good fit

One con of using a personality test for recruiting employees is that it will not accurately tell you if the employee is a good fit for the position. Personality tests are good, but you have to combine them with other tests. Listening to the candidate and seeing how they react and handle a stressful situation is just as important. —Alfredo Atanacio, Uassist.ME

 

Con: It could offer an inaccurate reflection of their personality

One con would be that people may try to guess what you want them to say, so it could turn out to be an inaccurate reflection of that person’s true personality. Then you are tempering your interactions, goals, etc. off information that is not relatable to the person. —Brad Burns, Wayne Contracting

RELATED: The 4 Types of Questions to Ask Candidates in a Job Interview

The post Using Personality Tests as a Hiring Tool: What Are the Pros and Cons? appeared first on AllBusiness.com. Click for more information about YEC. Copyright 2020 by AllBusiness.com. All rights reserved. The content and images contained in this RSS feed may only be used through an RSS reader and may not be reproduced on another website without the express written permission of the owner of AllBusiness.com.

Today we’re announcing that my partner Kara Nortman is becoming Co-Managing Partner at Upfront Ventures and I can’t tell you how thrilled I am to welcome her to her new role.

As with all promotions, the reality is that Kara was already acting as a senior leader at our firm and also in the industry at large. She had all of the skills and traits we sought — leadership, mentorship, competitiveness, communications, relationship-building — and of course a relentless pursuit of helping founders succeed.

I’ve become fond of saying “if I had a dollar for every person who told me just how much they loooooved Kara Nortman, I’d have a 10x fund.” So mostly we just had to listen to customer feedback from founders, VCs and LPs.

Why Kara?

Kara is a natural leader and loves taking ownership of tasks and over-performing. She has an amazing ethical compass with heart, compassion and drive. She’s empathetic and brings great humor to her work as well.

I remember years ago trying to recruit Kara. It took me three years to persuade her to join. I called an (ex) LP to tell him about her and my goals for her. He said to me (only 9 years ago), “I hope you’re not just hiring her because she’s a woman.” (I promise you, he really said this out loud.)

My literal response was, “She went to Princeton undergrad and has a Stanford MBA. She worked for 5 years as a VC at Battery Ventures and co-headed M&A at IAC working with Barry Diller. She took an operating role helping run Citysearch and Urbanspoon. On paper she’s more qualified than Yves or myself so with that out of the way can we now just focus on her skills and how you help me recruit her?”

Kara said “no” because she wanted to start her own company, which she did and I backed. At the end of that journey she joined Upfront as a partner where she’s been for > 6 years so she now has walked in the footsteps of the people she will back. She made the right decisions not joining back then because that founder empathy is the “++” that makes a difference in this business.

But if you know Kara, you likely already know all of this. So why now? And what does that really mean for the firm?

Why Now?

In any job you either find leadership opportunities for your best people BEFORE they ask or other people start asking them to become leaders somewhere else. Leadership is about recognizing your next generation of talent and helping lift them up. Or, maybe it’s just about getting out of the way and watching what they can achieve.

Our industry needs more female leaders and they shouldn’t have to all quit their respective firms and raise their own funds to get a shot at running things. The fact that Kara doesn’t have what my wife likes to refer jokingly as my “Y chromosome problem” is beside the fact. She’s more qualified than I and I know she’ll eventually eclipse the things that Yves and I have built over the past couple of decades.

Venture capital is about backing the leaders of tomorrow who imagine the world as it should be and aren’t constrained by what it is today. As an industry we’re not always as good as we could be about our own “creative destruction” to create the tomorrow of venture capital. It’s time to prepare Kara to help smash some more glass ceilings.

So What Does All This Mean?

The core of the investing job of course is investing dollars into startup companies and helping as a mentor, advisor and board member on the companies in which you’ve invested. But there is so much more that goes into running a successful fund, including:

• Planning reserves for follow-on investments
• Building portfolios of risk by sector, geography and stage
• Raising capital from LPs and then communicating and reporting back to them
• Recruiting and training staff at our firm
• Handling legal issues, accounting and annual audits
• Regularly reviewing the competitive strategy of your firm to make sure you don’t become complacent
• Oh. And all the platform stuff. Marketing, recruiting, building data products & tools, event management, analyzing the portfolio, etc.

In reality we have an amazing team for which we have dedicated staff who manage many of these functions but as a leader, as a Managing Partner, you have ultimate responsibility. Kara will now be really involved with what goes on to successfully create and run a firm but while still handling her core duties of funding great entrepreneurs.

Does This Mean You’re Retiring?

Fuck no. I’m only 52! I’ll still work with Kara managing the next few funds, but I’ve already been pushing for our firm to do more to diversify our activities and this will allow me to focus on some of that. For example, we’re now already well into our third growth fund that we started in 2015 (the first returned 2x cash in 3.5 years). So beyond running our flagship “Series Seed / A” fund there is much more to be done and I’m confident Kara will step up to that task.

Wait, What About Yves? And Greg?

Just as Yves mentored me when I became his co-managing partner in 2011, he didn’t seek to ride off into the sunset either. Instead he championed our investment themes into sustainability and food technologies having invested in companies like Apeel Sciences and Ynsect. He’s helped me run the Upfront holding company activities for all of these years and will continue to do so. Yves enjoys the same things I do — investing in the brightest and most driven entrepreneurs we have access to and helping guide them as they build amazing companies and industries. So Yves thankfully isn’t going anywhere either! We’ve worked together for more than 20 years now. And it would be my great pleasure to work with Yves for another 20 years. Just you watch.

And that Greg Bettinelli chap? What’s he doing? Listen, I think most of us if you gave us a choice would prefer “just” to be great investors and to spend all of our time on portfolio work. Greg has always been clear that he loves investing the most and he’s been incredibly successful having led our investments in GOAT, Ring, ThredUp and now more recently in companies like Rally. Greg is part of our executive leadership team and already helps run the firm. He launched our scout program as an example. But when we sat down one-on-one 18 months ago and talked about what the firm should look like in the future he proactively said “Kara is the best person to help run the firm. I’ll help own functions but I mostly just want to back great founders and not have to own all the other BS.”

So There You Have It

We have an amazing team including our newest Partner, Aditi Maliwal, who runs our FinTech investment practice and is based in San Francisco. In fact, Kara led the effort to recruit our newest partner and it was then that it was first clear to me how amazing she would be at the role.

Please help me welcome Kara into her role as Co-Managing Partner. I am truly thrilled to see what she makes of it.

---

Kara Nortman Was Just Promoted to Co-Managing Partner at Upfront Ventures. Here’s What it All Means was originally published in Both Sides of the Table on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Today we’re announcing that my partner Kara Nortman is becoming Co-Managing Partner at Upfront Ventures and I can’t tell you how thrilled I am to welcome her to her new role.

As with all promotions, the reality is that Kara was already acting as a senior leader at our firm and also in the industry at large. She had all of the skills and traits we sought — leadership, mentorship, competitiveness, communications, relationship-building — and of course a relentless pursuit of helping founders succeed.

I’ve become fond of saying “if I had a dollar for every person who told me just how much they loooooved Kara Nortman, I’d have a 10x fund.” So mostly we just had to listen to customer feedback from founders, VCs and LPs.

Why Kara?

Kara is a natural leader and loves taking ownership of tasks and over-performing. She has an amazing ethical compass with heart, compassion and drive. She’s empathetic and brings great humor to her work as well.

I remember years ago trying to recruit Kara. It took me three years to persuade her to join. I called an (ex) LP to tell him about her and my goals for her. He said to me (only 9 years ago), “I hope you’re not just hiring her because she’s a woman.” (I promise you, he really said this out loud.)

My literal response was, “She went to Princeton undergrad and has a Stanford MBA. She worked for 5 years as a VC at Battery Ventures and co-headed M&A at IAC working with Barry Diller. She took an operating role helping run Citysearch and Urbanspoon. On paper she’s more qualified than Yves or myself so with that out of the way can we now just focus on her skills and how you help me recruit her?”

Kara said “no” because she wanted to start her own company, which she did and I backed. At the end of that journey she joined Upfront as a partner where she’s been for > 6 years so she now has walked in the footsteps of the people she will back. She made the right decisions not joining back then because that founder empathy is the “++” that makes a difference in this business.

But if you know Kara, you likely already know all of this. So why now? And what does that really mean for the firm?

Why Now?

In any job you either find leadership opportunities for your best people BEFORE they ask or other people start asking them to become leaders somewhere else. Leadership is about recognizing your next generation of talent and helping lift them up. Or, maybe it’s just about getting out of the way and watching what they can achieve.

Our industry needs more female leaders and they shouldn’t have to all quit their respective firms and raise their own funds to get a shot at running things. The fact that Kara doesn’t have what my wife likes to refer jokingly as my “Y chromosome problem” is beside the fact. She’s more qualified than I and I know she’ll eventually eclipse the things that Yves and I have built over the past couple of decades.

Venture capital is about backing the leaders of tomorrow who imagine the world as it should be and aren’t constrained by what it is today. As an industry we’re not always as good as we could be about our own “creative destruction” to create the tomorrow of venture capital. It’s time to prepare Kara to help smash some more glass ceilings.

So What Does All This Mean?

The core of the investing job of course is investing dollars into startup companies and helping as a mentor, advisor and board member on the companies in which you’ve invested. But there is so much more that goes into running a successful fund, including:

• Planning reserves for follow-on investments
• Building portfolios of risk by sector, geography and stage
• Raising capital from LPs and then communicating and reporting back to them
• Recruiting and training staff at our firm
• Handling legal issues, accounting and annual audits
• Regularly reviewing the competitive strategy of your firm to make sure you don’t become complacent
• Oh. And all the platform stuff. Marketing, recruiting, building data products & tools, event management, analyzing the portfolio, etc.

In reality we have an amazing team for which we have dedicated staff who manage many of these functions but as a leader, as a Managing Partner, you have ultimate responsibility. Kara will now be really involved with what goes on to successfully create and run a firm but while still handling her core duties of funding great entrepreneurs.

Does This Mean You’re Retiring?

Fuck no. I’m only 52! I’ll still work with Kara managing the next few funds, but I’ve already been pushing for our firm to do more to diversify our activities and this will allow me to focus on some of that. For example, we’re now already well into our third growth fund that we started in 2015 (the first returned 2x cash in 3.5 years). So beyond running our flagship “Series Seed / A” fund there is much more to be done and I’m confident Kara will step up to that task.

Wait, What About Yves? And Greg?

Just as Yves mentored me when I became his co-managing partner in 2011, he didn’t seek to ride off into the sunset either. Instead he championed our investment themes into sustainability and food technologies having invested in companies like Apeel Sciences and Ynsect. He’s helped me run the Upfront holding company activities for all of these years and will continue to do so. Yves enjoys the same things I do — investing in the brightest and most driven entrepreneurs we have access to and helping guide them as they build amazing companies and industries. So Yves thankfully isn’t going anywhere either! We’ve worked together for more than 20 years now. And it would be my great pleasure to work with Yves for another 20 years. Just you watch.

And that Greg Bettinelli chap? What’s he doing? Listen, I think most of us if you gave us a choice would prefer “just” to be great investors and to spend all of our time on portfolio work. Greg has always been clear that he loves investing the most and he’s been incredibly successful having led our investments in GOAT, Ring, ThredUp and now more recently in companies like Rally. Greg is part of our executive leadership team and already helps run the firm. He launched our scout program as an example. But when we sat down one-on-one 18 months ago and talked about what the firm should look like in the future he proactively said “Kara is the best person to help run the firm. I’ll help own functions but I mostly just want to back great founders and not have to own all the other BS.”

So There You Have It

We have an amazing team including our newest Partner, Aditi Maliwal, who runs our FinTech investment practice and is based in San Francisco. In fact, Kara led the effort to recruit our newest partner and it was then that it was first clear to me how amazing she would be at the role.

Please help me welcome Kara into her role as Co-Managing Partner. I am truly thrilled to see what she makes of it.

---

Kara Nortman Was Just Promoted to Co-Managing Partner at Upfront Ventures. Here’s What it All Means was originally published in Both Sides of the Table on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It was painful to get out of bed. The 8-hour hike straight up and down the side of a mountain in Chilean Patagonia had me not wanting to move at…

The post 5 Surprisingly Simple Ways to Stay Productive on the Road appeared first on Natalie Sisson's The Suitcase Entrepreneur.

With every startup or business idea, there comes a dream to scale it to the moon. I am a journalist with two small startups under my belt. Being in the startup world for years, I have been on both sides of the spectrum. On one hand, I have mentored many startups due to my association with incubators and accelerators, and on the other hand, I have done extensive research into possible resources, mentors, guides, investors, and backers that I, personally can utilize for my own startups.

When you are a programmer, the reality of your idea is just behind some lines of code; but, if you are a non-technical founder like me, things become difficult. What do you do?

You collaborate with entities like a startup studio.

The recent trend of startup studios is giving non-technical founders access to resources that help them “build” their idea. These resources can be in the form of mentorship, specialized teams, and technical leadership as well.

If you have never heard of a startup studio then here is what you need to know. It is a setup that is built to enable and support other startups. It can also be called a startup factory. The three aspects that define a startup studio are:

– internally generated ideas,

– the singular goal of supporting other startups,

– and a proper infrastructure of idea enabling resources.

The question is, does it help?

Companies such as Dollar Shave Club came out of the Science startup studio in Santa Monica, California, and prove to be a good case study for what’s possible.

As a non-technical founder, collaborating with a startup studio can provide you with the following benefits:

1. It can act as your CTO/Co-Founder

Startup studios are more invested in your business than a web design agency. This is because startup studios build you from the ground up, they help you launch the idea and watch it grow. Hence, they are motivated to provide guidance, support, and resources for a longer period of time.

Startup studios also act as your co-founder and CTO to “build” your product and later also work on the growth of your startup and devise strategies for the future. The key interest of any startup studio is the success and growth of their startups, its valuations, and its future.

2. It helps to create blueprints or prototypes

In the startup world, if you are stepping in with just a passionate idea without proper resources, guidance, or backup. There is little chance that your startup will succeed.

However, with a startup studio, you can raise your success rate significantly. It is because they provide an almost foolproof blueprint on how to launch and develop your idea. With the help of a startup studio, you can build a prototype you can use to move forward with your idea, validate it, do risk analysis, or calculate possible lacks and failures.

3. It can help you validate product/market fit

When you come up with an idea, initially that is all it is. No matter how great, how innovative, or problem solving an idea is, it is just… an idea. Until you roll up your sleeves and work on it. Once you get started on bringing your idea to a reality that’s when the first pool of obstacles, failures, and problems arrive. This is the first test of your endurance and the validity of your idea.

With a startup studio, you can do just that. You can take your idea, create a prototype, launch it, and validate if it can withhold in the real world.

4. It gives you access to idea pools

Startup studios go through several businesses, ideas, potential startups on an everyday basis. Their exposure, to new ideas, technologies, and possibilities, is immense. The individuals in the studio are also tech-savvy and innovative which leads to even more solutions and ideas.

It is a high possibility that when growing your startup you will reach a dead-end, a failure, a u-turn, or crossroads. When faced with such situations, you can bounce ideas, discuss, evaluate, and analyze each opportunity or solution with the startup studio. The diverse set of mindsets will allow you to make a suitable pivot for the future of your company.

5. It lets you tap into a pool of resources

With a startup studio, you have easy access to tech-savvy, diverse minded, experienced, professionals. A startup studio has a team of designers, developers, marketers, and administrative staff for the early-stage startups they are associated with.

Having access to a pool of resources, startups can get all the help they need in launching their idea without hiring and thus, saving the expense of salaries during its prototype phase.

Conclusion

While a studio startup can be highly impactful for non-technical founders, it can be highly beneficial and enabling for technical founders as well. To run a business you need a whole team of experts and enablers, a startup can not be a one-man show. To thrive, every startup requires collaboration, loyalty, sharing of ideas, resources, and a team to lean on. So whether you are a non-techincal or a technical founder joining a venture-capital-backed studio will absolutely enable growth opportunities.

“No more romanticizing about how cool it is to be an entrepreneur. It’s a struggle to save your company’s life – and your own skin – every day of the week.”

— Spencer Fry, co-founder of CarbonMade

The post How Collaborating With a Startup Studio Can Save Non-Technical Founders appeared first on Startup Digest Blog.

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This post on how to raise money successfully using simple crowdfunding steps answers common questions for startup entrepreneurs and small businesses thinking about using crowdfunding to raise funding.

I have been in the crowdfunding space since 2008, after experiencing first-hand one of the biggest problems plaguing new businesses: There was a $40 billion gap in funding every year! That year, I founded one of the first crowdfunding platforms for U.S. Read more…

Recommended: How To Get Influencers To Endorse And Grow Your Business

Revised and updated Oct. 27, 2020

Smart leaders understand how powerful having different personality types in the workplace can be. Personality tests like Myers-Briggs and Enneagram can measure a person’s specific personality traits in multiple ways. Many companies have begun using these evaluations to help them better understand potential and current employees, providing them with valuable insights they may not have obtained any other way.

As with all approaches, however, there are a number of positives and negatives to using personality tests. To help us understand the extent to which employers should rely on personality tests for their recruitment or employee development efforts, we asked 13 entrepreneurs from Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) the following question:

What’s one pro or one con for using personality tests for recruiting and/or developing employees? Why?

Pro: They serve as great conversation tools

Personality tests are not a one-size-fits-all tool to identify and recruit employees, but they can be great conversation tools for existing and new staff. When used in addition to staff training and growth tools, personality tests can serve as a tool to discuss aspects of your team members’ behavior or their sense of self, helping them to open up and discover more about themselves. —Darby Cox, Darby Cox LLC

Pro: They can help match people to jobs they’d enjoy

Personality tests can be extremely beneficial in the hiring and development process for employees. I’ve found the DISC personality test to be beneficial for matching people with jobs they’d enjoy and likely be successful at. It also allows you to communicate with others more effectively, as it gives you a better understanding of how people process information. —Kevin Getch, Webfor

 

Pro: They can eliminate unqualified candidates

I think that you can use personality tests when recruiting employees, but that’s about it. Red flag questions on the test can help you eliminate people who are not qualified, which helps you save time and money. You’ll also improve the chances of hiring someone who will fit into their new role. —John Brackett, Smash Balloon LLC

 

Pro: They may offer better perspective on past experiences

Personality tests are useful in hiring because they can test what people will do in specific situations, so you can get a true perspective on their past experiences. Candidates will tell you great stories about how they handled certain situations, but a personality test will give you better insight into why they behaved that way since most people can’t fake their responses. —Josh Kohlbach, Wholesale Suite

Pro: They can identify how employees can be integrated into the team

Understanding how someone operates best is just as important as the education and skill set they carry. The Gallup CliftonStrengths assessment is a great test to gauge where a candidate stands in their natural state and how they will integrate into your existing team. It can be used to identify what candidates and personalities will fill gaps in the company culture that you might have. —Matthew Podolsky, Florida Law Advisers, P.A.

Pro: They may be more relevant to an employee’s inner self

I think personality tests are interesting and possibly useful, but they are also limited, especially when it comes to the workplace. They are fairly abstract and probably indicate more about an employee’s inner self and potential than how someone is actually going to perform on a day-to-day basis. You can use them, but also look at more measurable factors, such as what people have actually done. —Kalin Kassabov, ProTexting

Other Articles From AllBusiness.com:

• The Complete 35-Step Guide for Entrepreneurs Starting a Business
• 25 Frequently Asked Questions on Starting a Business
• 50 Questions Angel Investors Will Ask Entrepreneurs
• 17 Key Lessons for Entrepreneurs Starting A Business

Con: They are not a final testimony of character

The important thing to remember with the Myers-Briggs or Enneagram tests is that they are not ironclad reports that give you a final testimony of a person’s character. They are meant to help you understand what a person’s preferences are. This will enable you to help people find work and tasks that they’ll love to do, which will help you create a great workplace with high productivity. —Syed Balkhi, WPBeginner

Con: They could set employers up to be biased

I think a significant con of using personality tests for recruiting is it sets you up to be biased. You may attribute a candidate’s behavior and words to what the test says, rather than actively listening to people. It’s important to be aware that you could misjudge a person. Keep an open mind and rely on your experience to help you understand a candidate’s fit with your business. —Blair Williams, MemberPress

Con: It’s possible they will generate false positives

I don’t like personality tests because they’re not always accurate and often measure a person’s state of mind at the time they take the test. Many people aren’t comfortable during the hiring process, so you’re getting a false positive. If you insist on using these tests, make them only one factor in your hiring decision. —Thomas Griffin, OptinMonster

 

Con: They risk pigeonholing employees to generic norms

A personality test pigeonholes employees to standards and norms that apply to a trend of people, but should not be used to judge the individual. The risk with these tests is that we seek to derive too much data about a person, and instead they should just be an indicator as to strategies and ways to manage and motivate individuals to improve. They should be used to provide a guiding checkpoint and start more conversation. —Nicole Munoz, Nicole Munoz Consulting, Inc.

Con: They fail to sum up an individual as a whole

The main con of using a personality test is that it fails to sum up an individual as a whole. People are complex and it takes more than a test or a few tests to understand what they would be like to work with. You’re better off contacting their references to get the most accurate, current information about how they are in the workplace. —Jared Atchison, WPForms

 

Con: They don’t truly show if an employee is a good fit

One con of using a personality test for recruiting employees is that it will not accurately tell you if the employee is a good fit for the position. Personality tests are good, but you have to combine them with other tests. Listening to the candidate and seeing how they react and handle a stressful situation is just as important. —Alfredo Atanacio, Uassist.ME

 

Con: It could offer an inaccurate reflection of their personality

One con would be that people may try to guess what you want them to say, so it could turn out to be an inaccurate reflection of that person’s true personality. Then you are tempering your interactions, goals, etc. off information that is not relatable to the person. —Brad Burns, Wayne Contracting

RELATED: The 4 Types of Questions to Ask Candidates in a Job Interview

The post Using Personality Tests as a Hiring Tool: What Are the Pros and Cons? appeared first on AllBusiness.com. Click for more information about YEC. Copyright 2020 by AllBusiness.com. All rights reserved. The content and images contained in this RSS feed may only be used through an RSS reader and may not be reproduced on another website without the express written permission of the owner of AllBusiness.com.