Personality tests have been popular due to the importance of understanding how an employee or job candidate will behave. Since poor performance usually related to behavioral issues, measuring job behavior is essential. However, personality tests are very general, usually measuring only 5-10 personality factors which are used for every job. They have typically not been found to be highly predictive.  In contrast, Harrison Assessments’ award winning suitability assessment is designed to measure engagement, motivation, interpersonal skills and retention factors related to specific jobs. The 20 minute Smart Questionnaire™ measures 175 factors, but only a sub-set of about 30-40 factors are relevant to analyze suitability for a specific job.  However, for any job there will be a different mix of factors with research based weighting associated with each.

Why is job-specific suitability testing so important?

The 5-10 factors measured by personality tests are not sufficient for a wide variety of jobs. For example, technical jobs typically require employees to be detail oriented, and systematic. Sales positions typically require employees to be convincing, self-confident, and self-motivated. Customer service positions typically require employees to be efficient, helpful, warm and positive. Management positions typically require a leader to be strategic, resourceful, and interpersonally skilled. Even within the same job type, the required behaviors can be quite different. For example, some management positions are operational in nature and emphasize behaviors such as following structure, being organized, and enforcing rules. Other management positions are entrepreneurial in nature, and emphasize behaviors such as creativity, initiative, collaboration, adaptability, and personal drive.  Sales positions can also greatly vary. Some sales positions require systematically hunting for new customers and persisting with cold calls.  Other sales positions focus on building client relationships, upselling or efficiently servicing the customer. In addition, each job has a different set of “derailers” or personal characteristics that can obstruct one’s success. It defies logic to suggest that one set of 5-10 personality factors calibrated in the same way for every job could be effective in predicting  job specific success?  Also, in terms of using it for development, it is also highly questionable because with so few traits to focus on,  one must generalize and you rarely have the opportunity to provide insight on strengths to which you can shift so you must rely on focusing them on a challenge or weakness which is often a counter-productive strategy.

Hire for job specific behaviors

Research conducted by Harrison Assessments® formulates different sets behavioral factors for more than 650 job types. Each job type also has different behavioral requirements depending on the required management level and experience level. Consequently, by uniquely calibrating management responsibility and experience levels, the Harrison system offers more than 6500 “Job Success Formulas” that predict success for the specific job. Organizations can also make adjustments based upon their unique key performance factors.

Measure qualifications (eligibility)

Some recruiters make the mistake of hiring people only for their qualifications, resulting in bad hires related to behavioral weaknesses. Other recruiters make the mistake of over-emphasizing behavioral factors by eliminating people only on the basis of their behavioral assessments. Sometimes they even unfairly eliminate candidates based on a single behavioral factor. Behavioral assessments should be part of the overall assessment that includes qualifications such as experience, education, and skills. That’s why the Harrison system provides a unique eligibility assessment that complements the suitability assessment, providing an overall score for better hiring and succession planning.

Hire for engagement

Although personality can be part of engagement, personality tests do not effectively measure engagement. The Harrison Suitability Profile measures the alignment between the job/organization and the employee’s goals/aspirations. It reveals psychological conditions that translate to engagement for specific jobs enabling organizations to hire for engagement, as well as develop engagement for specific employees, resulting in increased discretionary effort and retention

Hire for Retention

Hiring top talent without being able to retain that talent has little value. That’s why the Harrison Suitability Profile is also designed to measure likely job satisfaction for specific jobs incorporating retention into its suitability score and providing reports that empower managers to retain top talent.

Enhance the interview

The Harrison recruitment system provides a framework that keeps interviewers focused on the eligibility and suitability factors that lead to job success. With just a short training course, interviewers are empowered to elicit disclosure and honesty resulting in exceptional clarity for decision-making, positive talent relationships and greater retention.

Replicate your top performers with benchmarking

The Harrison system has an integrated research engine that enables you to pinpoint the success factors for jobs with 30 or more employees. This highly sophisticated technology performs hundreds of thousands of calculations unveiling the exact success factors and derailers related to specific jobs. The resulting formula is highly predictive for recruitment and highly effective for employee development.

Customize for your behavioral competencies

The Harrison system is the only system that can be customized to measure your organization’s unique behavioral competencies and/or core values. The Harrison reports will reflect your behavioral competency names and concepts when hiring, developing, or  promoting employees.

Legal Compliance and Protection

Don’t settle for legal compliance. Personality tests are a grey area of the law because the general factors are not job specific and their related questions often invite legal challenges. Many recent lawsuits related to personality tests resulted in large settlements. Since the Harrison Suitability Assessment is entirely focused on job requirements and the questions are entirely work related, it clearly meets employment laws and prevents lawsuits.