Hiring the Right Personality Matters, and AI Can Help It's important to find the right employees in order for your business to succeed. Here's how AI can help you find the perfect match.
By Martin Rowinski Edited by Amanda Breen
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Between companies and departments, businesses typically have many different people running interviews. While not everyone is good at reading personalities, an interviewer should be — if he or she hopes to find the best candidate. Interviewing for the right personality in a potential employee gives you greater security in his or her fit for the role and within the company and in that person's ability to build a long-term relationship. Combining human interviewers with AI systems allows you to find the best fit faster.
First, here are some ways you can start to identify ideal candidates.
Understand what drives people
A personality is more than just the type of person. It also includes that person's attitude towards life and the things that drive him or her. While money is the popular go-to answer, happiness is a more reliable one when it comes to encouraging someone's drive. A person could make a lot of money and still hate waking up every morning to go to work. Employees like this will show up, do the minimum required of them and go home — until they quit, of course.
On the other hand, when you know what drives a person, you can create an environment where you get the most out of him or her. Someone who feels fulfilled by the work wants to do the best job possible. As a result, that person achieves more, receives more positive feedback and learns to value his or her own input, which leads to feeling more confident in his or her contribution to the company. When you interview for a personality that's compatible with a positive work environment, you have a better chance of keeping it that way.
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Assess how personality will impact performance
Understanding personality lets you know what someone stands for and his or her mission and vision in life. The best-matched employees have goals that align with your company and the position they want to fill. With every new employee comes training and settling in with the other employees, but getting to know an employee's personality in an interview gives you a preview of how well he or she will blend. Finding compatible personalities helps maintain a healthy work environment and further contributes to an employee's satisfaction and happiness.
Understanding personality when you interview for a position also reveals a person's comfort level with the expectations of it. A position that requires attendance at big meetings or shaking a lot of hands, for example, may not be best suited for someone who is an introvert. At the same time, a parent with two toddlers running around the house may not seem like the ideal pick for a remote position, but a strong-willed personality might give you the impression that he or she could be.
Related: Leaders: Here's The No. 1 Thing You Shouldn't Do When Interviewing Job Candidates
Look for passion and an interest in growth
A personality that wants to attack work with passion wants to grow along with the company. Everyone knows that a revolving door of employees is bad for business, but just like any long-term relationship, compatibility of attitude and drive plays a major part in sustaining it. Most people join a company with the hope of climbing higher, not being left behind, so if their motivations to succeed in life align with the job, they could be a good fit.
If you see they're eager to excel in the position and grow within the company, they can most likely imagine it too. If they come to the interview with a desire to be a valuable part of the team, this will be reflected in their personality — how they talk about their future, their goals and the passions that fuel them. When you know what drives people before even hiring them, you start with a more solid foundation on which to build a successful long-term relationship.
Related: Passion, People, Process
Narrow it down to the best with AI
Using artificial intelligence (AI) can help you understand even more about the potential capacities of an interviewee and find the best fit for a position. Already, AI in human resources is on the rise. These programs can glean information about someone's personality based on behaviors during the interview, like how pursing the lips can indicate discomfort with a question and gesturing with both hands can mean someone's lying.
An AI analysis during the interview can give you a big picture of a candidate's personality. For example, people-intelligence startup Humantic.ai can process a person's LinkedIn data and return some mind-blowing insights into their trustworthiness. During a second interview, that information paints a clearer picture of someone's potential future with your company. With the combined skills of human intuition and AI precision, the best candidate will rise to the top.
Using these advanced AI systems allows interviewers to structure follow-up interviews by asking the right questions based on the candidate's personality traits, which AI gives you insight into. You're able to access their Big Five personality traits and understand their workplace behavior, which ultimately results in a more productive hiring process.
Interviewing for personality provides insight into a candidate's capacity to fill the position, and AI can confirm, reinforce or challenge those considerations. We may never know 100% of a person's interests or behaviors, but with AI we can capture and analyze subtle details that reveal deeper meanings. It may not be the holy grail for making decisions in an interview, but AI can add new data to your own intuitive readings of someone's personality, helping you narrow down the candidates to the best one.
