Why All Interviewers Should be Personality Tested, Not Candidates

About 30 years ago, I took my first Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test. I had just started out as a recruiter and one of my clients required all final candidates to take the exam before an offer was extended. To make sure I knew what was going on, I took the exam. I failed. The HR VP said I’d be a terrible engineer, a decent recruiter, but a great plant manager.

This seemed odd to me, since I knew I was a better engineer than a plant manager, but wanted to be a recruiter.

A couple of years later, a candidate put on his resume that his greatest strength was that he was an ENTJ. According to Myers-Briggs this is “life’s natural leader.” During the interview I asked the person to describe his greatest leadership accomplishment. It was pretty lame.

After a few other stories like this, I started thinking that Myers-Briggs was more about preferences, than ability. Even Myers and Briggs caution its use this way, but this message seems to have been lost on those who sell and use these tests. The indicator describes what people prefer to do, not if they’re good at it.

Then I heard about the DISC test and all its variants, like Calipers and Predictive Index, which are offshoots of Myers-Briggs, but have cooler charts and graphs to make them seem more scientific. Regardless of this vein of cynicism, I do find value in these types of personality profiling techniques, but not for screening out people before they’ve been interviewed. I suggest testing only the finalists. More important, I suggest that all interviewers be tested before they interview anyone. This will reduce their tendency to filter out good people due to their own style and natural biases. Here’s a quick way to try this idea out.

Use Two Questions to Determine Your Mini-DISC Style in Two Minutes

Over the years, I developed a two-minute shortcut for determining a person’s dominant style using these two questions.

Question 1: are you fast or slow making decisions? If you’re very impatient and would rather make decisions with limited information, put yourself on the right side of the diagram. If you’re risk-averse, and would rather have more information to decide the best course of action, put yourself on the left.

Question 2: are you more into results or relationships? People who are more focused on the success of the project and are less sensitive to the needs of the people involved fall somewhere in the top half of the grid. Those who are more concerned with the people involved are in the bottom half.

Your answers to these simple questions categorize you into one of these four mini-DISC styles:

Directors (impatient and results): these are people who are driven and results-oriented. They are dominant, frank, make quick hiring decisions based more on intuition than facts, and at times can be perceived as heavy-handed or over-bearing.

Influencers (impatient and people): these people are typically extroverted, friendly and persuasive, possessing the classic salesperson persona. They quickly decide whom to hire based on first impressions.

Supporters (patient and people): these people are the consensus builders – HR people, diplomats and counselors. When hiring, they look for people who “fit” with the organization and are team players.

Controllers (patient and results) these people are the classic analyzers and techies. They tend to focus on experience and technical expertise when making hiring decisions.

Adopt Your Anti-DISC Style to Improve Interviewing Accuracy

During our hiring manager interview training programs, we ask managers to categorize themselves into one of these four styles. We then ask them to take on the traits of their “least like,” or diagonally opposite style, to improve their interviewing accuracy. Here’s how this is done:

• Directors need to become more like Supporters, slowing down long enough to hear everyone’s viewpoint, especially those who disagree with you, using evidence rather than intuition and gut feelings, before deciding.
• Influencers need to become more like Controllers, getting evidence of the candidate’s actual performance and ability, rather than overvaluing first impressions and personality.
• Supporters need to become more like Directors, judging the person more on the results achieved, not just whether the person fits the culture and is a team player.
• Controllers need to become more like Influencers, determining if the person can work with a variety of different people, not just assessing their technical competency.

With this role-reversal mindset, it’s certainly appropriate to determine the candidate’s dominant style during the interview using the same two questions. As part of this, look for people who are flexible and can adjust their natural style to fit the situation. When used this way, the mini-DISC personality style assessment is an effective tool to better understand a candidate’s flexibility, cultural fit, and the person’s ability to work with and manage others. This is a simple way for making better hiring decisions, especially when the interviewer is equally flexible, open-minded and objective.

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Lou Adler (@LouA) is the CEO of The Adler Group, a consulting firm helping companies implement Performance-based Hiring. His latest book, The Essential Guide for Hiring & Getting Hired (Workbench, 2013), covers the performance-based process described in this article in more depth. For more hiring advice join Lou's LinkedIn group and follow his Wisdom About Work series on Facebook.