This is the final installment of Hogan’s three-part blog series on selecting and developing artificial intelligence (AI) professionals. In the previous two installments, we discussed the demand for personality insights for artificial intelligence jobs, as well as using Hogan’s Artificial Intelligence Professionals personality profile for selection. In this final part, we will explain how to identify and develop AI professionals who have the potential to become organizational leaders.

Due to the high demand for artificial intelligence skills, organizations might not have a large talent pool from which to choose AI professionals. This may mean sacrificing some desirable aspects of performance, such as managerial potential. Plus, many of the characteristics that make someone a good AI professional won’t necessarily translate to leadership roles. For example, AI roles often involve working independently without needing to rely on a team. Individuals who thrive in independent environments have the potential to become managers who struggle to manage social behavior, communicate expectations, or spend time developing their team members. Fortunately, however, there are evidence-based strategies employers can use to identify and develop artificial intelligence professionals for leadership roles.

Hogan’s personality assessments can help identify the strengths and weaknesses of each employee’s unique personality characteristics. Measuring day-to-day personality (with the Hogan Personality Inventory), potential derailers (with the Hogan Development Survey), and values (with the Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory) can give employees a holistic view of their personalities and an understanding of how their strengths and weaknesses compare to others’. A disparity often exists between how we see ourselves (identity) and how others view us (reputation); Hogan measures reputation, which helps to reduce that disparity. Learning more about how others view our strengths and shortcomings can help us develop strategic self-awareness so we can capitalize on our strengths and start to develop our weaknesses, leading to stronger performance.

Many organizations rely on past performance data to promote employees. However, past performance is an imprecise predictor of future success when roles increase in scope, scale, and complexity. Good managers need to have highly developed interpersonal skills, which involves honest, open, and frequent communication with staff. The best leaders focus on developing others and building effective relationships that garner trust and draw out the best in the people they manage. Good managers should be able to move past their own egos and focus on building and developing high-performing teams. Organizations can use the Hogan assessments to provide opportunities for their employees to gain strategic self-awareness, orienting the organization’s development of current employees toward future opportunities.

Once employees are aware of their reputations, they can begin working on specific behaviors that impact them. As the organization supports their development journey, feedback should be provided to these employees to help inform their efforts and help them understand how to adjust their goals over time. To develop AI professionals for leadership roles, the organization may need to provide additional support, coaching, and structure to help them develop interpersonal skills that might not come naturally.

Organizations can continue to use the results of the Hogan assessments to engage and develop employees throughout their careers and to improve the health of their talent pipeline. If development efforts are only reserved for the highest potentials, organizations might miss out on a larger, more diverse group of talent. If organizations decide on high-potential talent without assessments, effective employees may be overlooked in favor of those who are overtly political but maybe not as effective. Not to mention, waiting to develop talent until they reach the highest levels creates the risk of small problems that could be easily addressed earlier on in an employee’s career becoming bigger issues as stress and pressure increase with job level. By investing in development earlier in the employee life cycle, organizations can strengthen their future pipeline. Change takes time, and the earlier you develop employees, the more practice they will have in developing the skills and coping methods to improve performance based on their strengths, weaknesses, and values.

Employees also see development as a top reason to remain with organizations, so investing in development both prepares future leaders and improves retention among high-value employees. This is especially important for companies hiring for jobs that are in high demand, such as AI jobs. Being able to retain employees in these types of jobs will provide organizations with a competitive advantage and help them save money and become more successful.

Hogan can provide a variety of personality- and competency-based reporting options to help organizations evaluate candidates and improve their assessment processes. To learn more about the Hogan Artificial Intelligence Professional profile, contact your local Hogan distributor or email info@hoganassessments.com.  

Peter Berry Consultancy, also known as PBC, is an authorized distributor of Hogan’s personality assessment solutions in Australia and the author of several products, including the Hogan 360° suite and the High Performing Team Assessment. PBC is also coauthor of the Hogan Safety Climate Survey.

Founded by managing director Peter Berry in 1990, PBC has grown into a leading global provider of human capital consulting services. PBC is a multidisciplinary global consulting firm with more than 30 years of experience in the delivery of best-practice solutions aimed at maximizing the potential and behavior of individuals, teams, leaders, and organizations.

PBC provides customer-focused, evidence-based people solutions that enable organizations to select the right people, develop key talent, build better teams, drive leadership capability, and enhance organizational performance. From offices in Sydney and Melbourne, PBC employs highly skilled, experienced consultants with backgrounds in psychology, business consulting, and human resources to support clients both locally and globally.

Research Contributions

PBC proudly applies an extensive collection of research, case studies, and thought leadership in developing solutions for clients. PBC’s expertise and insight into both local and global leadership is highlighted in recent work:

• What the Best Leaders Look Like – Research shows that the best leaders tend to be achievement focused, strategic, and inspiring, with high emotional competence. Leaders need to focus on improving their workload management and their ability to challenge poor performance.
• Leader Personality and Performance Differences in the Public Versus Private Sector – Understanding what differentiates leaders can be useful for selection and development. This white paper summarizes research that examines similarities and differences in the personality and multirater performance reviews of executives and managers within the Australian public and private sectors.
• Gender Differences in Australian Leadership – There has been a growing interest in understanding the similarities and differences between leaders of different genders. Insights in this area can have implications for the selection and development of leadership talent and leaders’ subsequent performance at the individual, team, and organizational levels.

For more details on these and other research topics, please visit peterberry.com.au/resources.

This is part two of Hogan’s three-part blog series on selecting and developing artificial intelligence (AI) professionals. In the first installment, we discussed the demand that led to the launch of this project. This time, we’ll explain the research process and the application of the selection profile.

Hogan partnered with consulting firms and clients around the world to improve selection accuracy for AI professionals. Based on our research, we defined AI professionals as individual contributors who are responsible for working with computers to analyze information, interpret and communicate that information to the company to drive strategy and decision-making, and develop and implement solutions to manage data.

Hogan developed a scientifically valid screening tool to identify specific competencies, characteristics, and values that predict job success for AI professionals. Hogan then used this information to build a custom Artificial Intelligence Professionals personality profile using the Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI), Hogan Development Survey (HDS), and Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory (MVPI). This profile enables companies to select higher-performing AI professional candidates.

Our research involved two steps. First, we conducted a job analysis. We reviewed job descriptions from O*NET for AI professional jobs, including business intelligence analysts, software developers, data engineers/scientists, and machine-learning specialists. We also conducted focus groups with subject-matter experts, and they completed a quantitative online job analysis survey.

Second, Hogan used validity generalization strategies including job family meta-analysis and synthetic/job component validity to identify the HPI- and HDS-based predictors of successful performance in AI professional jobs. Job analysis results provided evidence for relevant MVPI scales.

Hogan determined that successful AI professionals adapt to new changes and are energized by the challenge of their work. They take initiative to solve problems and can tolerate the more tedious aspects of working with data. In addition, AI professionals have a drive to seek out knowledge and update themselves on new developments related to their work.

By incorporating Hogan’s Artificial Intelligence Professionals personality profile into the candidate assessment process, companies can more effectively select AI professional candidates with the characteristics most important for success in their profession. Hogan’s research shows that if they choose to use our assessments in the selection process, companies can expect to see a 21% improvement in overall accuracy, selecting 10.5% more good hires and avoiding 10.5% more bad hires.

If you are interested in using the Artificial Intelligence Professionals profile for your organization, Hogan has developed a variety of personality- and competency-based reporting options that can help your organization evaluate candidates for AI jobs. To learn more about how you can use the profile, contact your local Hogan distributor or email info@hoganassessments.com.

Some of the biggest and most successful companies in our economy have been using big data for years. Google started with incorporating data algorithms to analyze relationships between websites and improve web searches. Amazon uses a customer database and algorithms to provide personalized shopping recommendations. More recently, Facebook received attention for its use of personal information from billions of users. Researchers mine this data for everything from political ads to personality assessment.¹

Today, it is challenging to find a company that is not using some form of AI. From algorithms to data mining to software development, AI has become a crucial means of becoming globally competitive. Companies such as Booking.com and India’s Flipkart use AI to inform their direction for product development. Websites such as Buzzfeed and Weibo that rely on clicks use AI to optimize the headlines they choose for their articles. Other companies, including Airbnb and Alibaba, use AI to inform their business decisions, while social networking sites such as Instagram and YouTube use it for recommending relevant content.

Given these trends, it is not surprising that AI jobs are in high demand or that the demand for AI skills is increasing. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics lists information security analysts and other data scientists among their top 20 fastest-growing occupations. Employment in these jobs is expected to grow by 31% in the U.S. over the next decade.² Meanwhile, in China the digital economy continues to grow rapidly, having reached $5.45 trillion USD (35.8 trln yuan) in 2019, accounting for 36.2% of the country’s total GDP, according to a report from the Chinese Academy of Cyberspace Studies.³ The growth is expected to continue over the next two decades and lead to the creation of numerous AI job opportunities. India will also experience an increase in digital growth; according to a McKinsey report, by 2025 the digital economy in India may account for 8% to 10% of India’s GDP.⁴

The U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Network online database (O*NET) reports a bright outlook for jobs such as computer and information research scientists, database administrators, business intelligence analysts, and computer systems engineers/architects. Burning Glass International, an analytics software company that specializes in job market analytics, has seen an increase in job descriptions that request machine learning skills.⁵ Indeed.com analyzed more than 30,000 listings and found that the top markets for AI jobs are China, the U.S., Japan, and the U.K.⁶

The global demand also means there’s an increased need to identify individuals who will be successful in these roles. As a personality assessment company with more than 40 years of research on job performance, Hogan knows that selecting the right people for these jobs will provide companies a key competitive advantage for becoming successful in the digital economy.

Hogan set out to research who will be most successful in AI professional roles. We interviewed numerous professionals in the digital economy from across the globe.  As an outcome of our research, we created a general profile of personality characteristics that are important for AI professional roles. We identified a variety of jobs that fall into this job family, including business intelligence analysts, data warehouse specialists, database administrators, computer and information research scientists, computer systems engineers, computer systems developers, and data scientists. A review of occupational activities and skills revealed that there is much overlap between these roles. Our final definition of an AI job in this family is “an individual contributor who works with computers to analyze information; interprets and communicates that information to the company to drive strategy and decision-making; and develops and implements solutions to manage data.”

Helping companies select and develop the highest-performing talent is Hogan’s main goal. With this AI professional roles research, we aim to set companies up for future success by understanding the jobs of the future and recommending the highest performers for those roles. 

This is part one of Hogan’s three-part blog series on selecting and developing artificial intelligence professionals, authored by Hogan’s Karen Fuhrmeister, PhD and Krista Pederson. In the next installment, we will discuss the research process we used to identify personality characteristics of successful AI professionals and the application of the selection profile.

References

1. Zialcita, P. (2019, October 30). Facebook Pays $643,000 Fine for Role In Cambridge Analytica Scandal. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2019/10/30/774749376/facebook-pays-643-000-fine-for-role-in-cambridge-analytica-scandal

2. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Occupational Outlook Handbook: Fastest Growing Occupations. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/fastest-growing.htm

3. Xinhua. (2020, November 23). China’s Digital Economy Reaches 35.8 trln Yuan in 2019 [Press release]. http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-11/23/c_139538040.htm

4. Kaka, N., Madgavkar, A., Kshirsagar, A., Gupta, R., Manyika, J., Bahl, K., & Gupta, S. (2019, March 27). Digital India: Technology to transform a connected nation. McKinsey Global Institute. https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/digital-india-technology-to-transform-a-connected-nation#

5. Columbus, L. (2020, December 27). Top 10 job skills predicted to grow the fastest in 2021. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2021/12/27/top-10-tech-job-skills-predicted-to-grow-the-fastest-in-2021/?sh=2b78afef6fde

6. Werber, C. (2019, February 12). This Is Where You Should Move if You Want a Job in AI. Quartz at Work. https://qz.com/work/1547302/the-best-cities-and-countries-to-live-in-if-you-want-a-job-in-ai/

We’d like to introduce you to the CEO of an energy company. Just about two years ago, he brought his friendly (high Interpersonal Sensitivity) and sociable (high Sociability) leadership to the organization. His assessment results portray a leader who is tuned into helping others (high Altruistic) and focused on creating a culture of teamwork (high Affiliation). A peek at his development plan outlines a focus on strategy and accountability.

Enter the COO, who is really the yin to the CEO’s yang; their personalities complement each other well. For instance, while the CEO is outgoing and takes a big-picture perspective, the COO tends to be more focused on the application of processes (moderate Inquisitive) and to approach social interactions in a Reserved manner. His lower Aesthetics score also leads him to focus on substance over form. He values productivity (low Altruistic) and likely prefers to work with minimal interruptions (low Affiliation). His development plan mentions goals of communication and collaboration, along with a need to react to scenarios with more urgency.

Both leaders are stress tolerant and resilient (high Adjustment). They are also high on the Imaginative and Mischievous scales — and they find commonality in valuing Recognition and Science. An investigation into the culture of the organization revealed growth in strategic direction and intent but decreases in capability development and organizational learning.

Interested in learning more about how their leadership styles shape the culture of the organization? Tune in to our collaborative webinar on Wednesday, April 21, 2021, beginning at 12:00 p.m. ET. The webinar will be cohosted by our partners at Denison Consulting. We’ll bring the personality narrative, and they’ll bring the culture data to tell an insightful story about how the power of multiple datapoints come together in a lesson of complementary work styles. The Denison Leadership Potential Report will also play a pivotal role in translating the insights from Hogan into a leadership model.

Click here to register for the webinar. We look forward to seeing you!

The 36th annual Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) conference is approaching, scheduled for April 14 through April 17. Like last year’s conference, 2021’s will be a bit different from those held in previous years — it will be virtual. This year, conference sessions will be both live and prerecorded, and many sessions will be available for viewing through May 7.

But one thing remains the same from pre-pandemic years: Hogan’s researchers and consultants are looking forward to attending and presenting some of Hogan’s many advances in personality research. Here’s a detailed schedule of the sessions we will be involved in.

Wednesday, April 14

Improving D&I: Personality Predicts Inclusion Behaviors

Chase Winterberg, JD, MA, Kimberly S. Nei, Jessica Walker

9:00 a.m. CT, Poster Room B

Inclusion fosters the benefits of diversity. Authors meta-analyzed personality, dark personality, and work-value predictors of inclusive work behaviors. Results suggest that individuals more likely to engage in inclusive behaviors at work are those who are emotionally stable, agreeable, conscientious, tolerant, open-minded, trusting, humble, honest, sympathetic, and concerned about helping others.

Providing Personality “Insight” to Competency Differentiation: A Synthetic Approach

Matthew R. Lemming

3:00 p.m. CT, Poster Room A

Competency modeling, when done correctly, should meet certain standards. Authors addressed whether Insight competencies are sufficiently specific without being too limiting. The study used synthetic validity meta-analyses to distinguish the personality predictors of business insight from industry insight and financial insight using the Hogan Personality Inventory and the Hogan Development Survey.

Development and Validation of a Personality-based Measure of General Employability

Michael Boudreaux, Nathan A. Hundley, Brandon Ferrell, Ryne A. Sherman

5:00 p.m. CT, Poster Room A

This research operationalizes a three-dimensional model of general employability. The model focuses on the broad personality domains of rewarding, able, and willing. Authors discuss the methods used to create scales for the general employability model, the psychometric properties and construct validity of those scales, and relationships to job performance.

Thursday, April 15

Executive Coaching in Extreme Times: Handling New and Unusual Scenarios

Josh Rogers

12:30 p.m., Room 8

This panel of experienced coaches will share best practices and insights from personal experience coaching leaders through new or unusual situations. Panelists will use a storytelling approach to this discussion, highlighting contextual considerations and tips for successfully building trust and rapport, as well as leveraging assessments to drive change and measuring the impact of coaching.

Are Machine Learning Algorithms a Hiring Panacea or Pandora’s Box?

Brandon Ferrell, Nathan A. Hundley

1:30 p.m. CT, Room 6

Machine learning has demonstrated value from predicting important workplace outcomes to solving complex data problems. However, challenges persist from limitations in extracting actionable insights to eliminating differences among protected classes. This debate will present different perspectives and seek a framework to analyze both the promises and limitations of machine learning in employment decision-making.

Professional Coaching: Issues, Perspectives, and Future Avenues

Scott Gregory

1:30 p.m., Room 8

The view of coaching is changing, and organizations are now increasingly receptive to its broader organizational value for all employees. This panel proposes discussions around future opportunities for coaching, new populations of employees who can benefit from coaching, and views on a multilevel coaching perspective to help inform future opportunities for IO psychology practitioners.

Friday, April 16

Diversity and Inclusion in Action: Approaches to Ignite Inclusive Workplaces

Kimberly S. Nei

12:30 p.m. CT, Room 3

This Ignite session brings together practitioners from different organizations to discuss the innovative approaches they are using to address diversity and inclusion. These strategies include leveraging engagement surveys to inform D&I initiatives, coaching, creating diverse candidate pools, incorporating minority employee journeys, and including personality measures to promote diversity.

Saturday, April 17

Toward Building a Better Understanding of Female Leaders

Ryne A. Sherman

9:00 a.m., Room 2

This symposium seeks to address the gender gap in the executive ranks by advancing our understanding of personality characteristics, obstacles, and development needs of female executives including ways in which they are different from and similar to their male executive and female nonexecutive counterparts.

The symposium will feature the following presentations:

• An Investigation of Dark Side Characteristics in Female Leaders (Sherman)
• Queen Bee Syndrome in Emotional Intelligence, Resilience, and Leadership
• Gender Differences in Endorsed Leadership Strengths and Desires for Leadership Coaching

Prerecorded Sessions

Demonstrating Natural Language Processing Applications for Improving Job Analysis

Kimberly S. Nei, Matthew R. Lemming, Nathan A. Hundley

The traditional methods used for validating selection solutions are often time and resource intensive. Recently, researchers have been exploring machine learning methods, such as natural language processing, for improving the efficiency or accuracy of traditional methods. This session will demonstrate actual applications for improving job analysis using natural language processing.

The symposium will feature the following presentations:

• BERT the Intern: An Application of Transfer Learning for Coding Focus Group Notes for Personality Relevance (Hundley, Nei, & Lemming)
• Automating Job Matching with Artificial Intelligence
• DEEP*O*NET: Using NLP to Leverage Detailed Text Descriptions of the World of Work

The Ever-evolving Testing Industry: Advancements and Trends

Brandon Ferrell, Ryne A. Sherman

This session examines trends in the testing industry (technology, AI, data privacy, diversity and inclusion), how the industry is innovating and adapting, and opportunities for research. The panel includes testing industry leaders from the Association of Test Publishers discussing industry shifts in assessment methods, trends that will shape the industry, and implications for IO professionals.

The Evolution of 360s and Practical Recommendations for Today

Ryne A. Sherman

Over the past 30 years, the psychometric foundations of 360-degree assessments have evolved and a wealth of experience on best practices in 360 assessments has been accumulated. In this session, four experts, two from large multinational organizations and two from major 360 consulting firms, share their knowledge, experiences, and views on changing trends regarding 360 assessments in applied settings.

Chaired by Hogan Chief Science Officer Ryne Sherman, the symposium will feature the following presentations:

• Latest Trends in 360 Assessment
• The Evolution of 360 Assessment at Shell: Conducting 360s at Large Scale
• Every Day is a Winding Road: The Evolution of 360 Feedback at PepsiCo
• The Leadership Versatility Index: A 25-year Odyssey to a Truly Innovative 360

Good Cop/Bad Cop: A Deep Dive into Police Officer Personality

Ryne A. Sherman, Chase Winterberg, JD, MA

Public awareness of police deviance and associated societal costs have driven a rethinking of what makes a police officer capable of doing their job well. Authors bring together three studies that examine the role of the police personality in public opinions about police, performance under pressure, and performance more generally. Implications for future research and practice will be discussed.

The symposium will feature the following presentations:

• A Public-Recommended Personality Profile of Successful Police (Winterberg)
• Cool Under Fire: Psychopathic Personality Traits and Decision-Making in Law Enforcement-oriented Populations
• One Bad Apple Ruins the Bunch: A Critical Examination of Dark Personality and Job Performance Among Police Officers (Sherman)

How Do We Measure Up?: Benchmarking Best Practices and Lessons Learned

Karen M. Fuhrmeister

Benchmarking data can be a powerful tool to inform decision-making and strategic planning. Clients are increasingly interested in benchmarking data, but the conversations around this topic often remain brief and shallow. This hybrid panel will discuss the “what,” “when,” and “how” of effective benchmarking in consulting practices through four large-scale studies and an interactive Q&A session.

Personality in the Workplace: How Much Does the Situation Matter?

Nathan A. Hundley, Ryne A. Sherman

Four studies uniquely illustrate how methodological and theoretical advances in situations research can be leveraged to advance our understanding of the role of personality in predicting individuals’ functioning in the workplace.

The symposium will feature the following presentations:

• Person-job Fit: Taking Situations Seriously (Hundley & Sherman)
• Personality States at Work: The Role of Traits and Self- and Other-rated Situations
• How Do Managers, Coworkers, and Subordinates Affect Workers’ Personality Expression?
• Situations Predicting Changes in Transformational Leadership and Core Self-evaluations

Research Incubator: Linking C-suite Personality/Behavior to Firm-level Metrics

Matthew R. Lemming, Jessica M. Walker

C-suite success is measured by a company’s financial performance. Using a research incubator format, authors present work linking CEO personality to firm financial metrics and share challenges faced when building our dataset and generating models used for analyses. They then break into groups to collaborate and discuss future research ideas using leader personality data linked to firm performance.

Selection Strategies to Hire Safe Workers and Improve Workplace Safety

Michael Boudreaux, Stephen Nichols

Workplace safety is a critical, multilevel issue. Much of the past research on occupational safety has focused on environmental factors to promote safer workplaces. More recent research focused on individual factors has shown that personal characteristics can be used to identify people likely to cause accidents, hire safer employees, and build large-scale training programs.

Since 2004, Advanced People Strategies (APS) has been an authorized Hogan distributor and provider of leadership and organizational development in the United Kingdom. Having certified more than 4,200 clients in the Hogan personality assessments and provided around 83,000 reports, APS is a key distributor for Hogan.

About the Advanced People Strategies Team

Founded by Chris Humphreys in 2003, the company’s name reflects the team’s ongoing aspiration to be a trusted partner to clients. APS strives to provide the best tools and techniques that can visibly improve people skills and organizational capabilities. All senior consultants have experience working in various industry sectors, which helps them better understand and support client needs.

To promote awareness of Hogan, the IT and Learning & Development teams use the latest virtual skills development technology to provide online meeting simulations and facilitator-led learning sessions for remote and office-based participants all over the world. Development needs identified by Hogan’s assessments and real-world simulation assessments are quickly translated to learnable tools and techniques through facilitated learning and skills practice sessions online. These tools allow organizations to maximize value by investing in targeted skills development.

We asked the APS team a few questions to help you learn more about their important work in the UK market.

Where have you seen the most growth in the UK market?

Executive recruitment firms have been a key sector showing interest in Hogan tools. The quality of Hogan assessments helps recruiters add real depth for their clients in understanding their candidates as part of the selection process. In a difficult market, using Hogan tools has supported these organizations as they expand their range of services and focus on leadership and executive team development activities to differentiate themselves.

What is the number-one lesson you’ve learned from responding to the COVID-19 crisis?

Agility is key. Being able to adapt to changing circumstances is critical to both our mental health and business continuity. The UK has had to cope with uncertainty from Brexit, government elections, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Turning on the news can have such a negative effect. In times of crisis, real leaders emerge to offer hope and inspiration. They are often humble and dismissive of their impact, but they make a difference.  

What are you most excited to see happen in 2021?

Being able to meet clients and colleagues face-to-face. We believe we are stepping into a paradigm shift regarding the nature of work. As many people and organizations have been forced to work from home for so long, benefits are emerging. Office requirements, business travel, and support for supply chains will change. Leaders have a lot to do and consider, and their selection and development is more critical than ever.

Never underestimate a sound talent acquisition strategy. When organizations commit to using personality tests in interviews, they find candidates who fit seamlessly into their roles. And the candidates who discover a perfect synergy between their personalities and roles? They end up making magic on the job. 

The Curious Case of Deputy Elton Simmons

Consider Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy Elton Simmons, a traffic cop whose story went viral in September 2012. His fame came from being something of a paradox: he gave people citations, but they still liked him.          

It all started when Captain Patrick E. Maxwell looked at Deputy Simmons’s record and made a shocking discovery. Despite the deputy’s two decades patrolling La Mirada’s roads, Deputy Simmons’s record remained totally free of complaints. As Captain Maxwell later explained to the media, a zero-complaint career in law enforcement is highly unusual. Almost all traffic patrols have complaints on file, simply because drivers do not appreciate citations. 

So how did Deputy Simmons maintain such a flawless record? How did he manage to discipline bad drivers and endear himself to the public? At first, you might assume that his popularity was a result of being unusually lenient. But that isn’t true — Deputy Simmons handed out more than 25,000 citations during the course of his career.                        

Journalist Steve Hartman shadowed the deputy for a day to see what his secret was. Hartman found a fairly simple explanation: Deputy Simmons delicately balanced authority with diplomacy.

At every opportunity, Deputy Simmons tried his best to offer people the benefit of the doubt. He also tried to avoid lectures and condescension. If a citation was necessary, he made sure to issue it with a kind smile. In short, Deputy Simmons exhibited fantastic interpersonal skills, which provided the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department with some great free publicity.

How to Recreate the Magic of Deputy Simmons

If all officers went through the same hiring process, then why did Deputy Simmons outperform the rest? If you guessed personality, then you are absolutely correct.

Deputy Simmons’s personality was well suited for his career in law enforcement.

Thankfully, your organization can be just as fortunate as the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department was with Deputy Simmons. Personality can be scientifically assessed and easily integrated into the hiring process. Furthermore, using personality tests in interviews can also safeguard against hiring ineffective candidates.

The Dangers of Derailment

Although a candidate’s intelligence, experience, and education are all important factors to consider, screening for these will not prevent derailment. 

Derailment is what happens when people cease to manage their behavior effectively at work, usually due to increased stress or pressure, although triggers can vary. Given that workplace stress is nearly ubiquitous, how candidates manage that stress determines how effective their job performance will ultimately be. The advantage of using personality tests in interviews becomes obvious when you examine how a mismatch between personality and role can end up derailing performance.

Let’s use an example. Imagine an officer who has an identical personality to Deputy Simmons, except one thing: he becomes withdrawn and tough when stressed. Do you think our imagined officer would be as consistently diplomatic as Deputy Simmons? Or what if our imagined officer differed in that he became more skeptical when stressed? Do you think this officer would give the public the benefit of the doubt as much as Deputy Simmons has? Or what if our imagined officer had less interpersonal sensitivity, would he still come across as understanding instead of condescending? You get the point. If a candidate’s personality does not closely align with the role, the risk of underperformance and derailment is high.        

Interviewers know that a candidate’s personality is important. Accordingly, most attempt to assess personality informally during interviews. They may ask candidates to elaborate on their résumés and ask random follow-up questions. But robust evidence shows that interviews without personality assessment data reveal little about candidates.

Interviews Need to Be Backed by Data

All candidates are on their best behavior during interviews. That’s why hiring managers need data to discern the subtle differences between those who are great, those who are good, and those who are ineffective.

Interviews without data pose a threat. You might overlook hidden gems and instead favor candidates who are skilled at making first impressions. In other words, data-free interviews sometimes let ineffective candidates rise to the top of the selection pool.

These ineffective candidates are what we call emergent, or highly charismatic and gifted at self-display. These candidates often outshine candidates who are what we call effective, or hardworking but less attention-seeking. During situational and behavioral style interviews, questions about opinions, attitudes, goals, aspirations, self-descriptions, and self-evaluations are often attempts to see personality at play. What interviewers may not know is that this ambiguity permits ineffective candidates to give a rosier view of their credentials. They may choose to focus on details irrelevant to the job to make a more favorable impression. This doesn’t mean that candidates are deceptive — just that people tend to idealize their own identities.

Conversely, if personality testing is implemented early in the hiring process, candidates will have very little opportunity to overstate their competencies. Interviewers will be able to see how candidates’ personality data overlap with how the candidates describe themselves. Our personalities remain stable during our adult lives, so you can expect the person you hire this year will still exhibit the same patterns of behavior in the future. One study found that teacher ratings of students’ personalities predicted their behavior 40 years later. 

All things considered, interviews are an incomplete hiring solution. Organizations that opt for using personality tests in interviews end up asking better interview questions. These data-driven questions are more focused and reveal more about who the candidate really is.

Hire Faster, Hire Better

Using personality tests in interviews also streamlines the candidate pool by standardizing the information you gather for a batch of candidates. Rather than slowing down the hiring process, this boosts efficiency by cutting down on the number of interviews. Companies that use personality tests see the applicant-to-hire ratios go down about 12%. Additionally, interview-to-hire ratios go down as much as 50%. These statistics mean that organizations can focus on quality over quantity. They will interview fewer people and the interviews that they do conduct are more focused.             

Lastly, using personality tests in interviews means you can measure values, or whether the candidate will actually enjoy the job. Happy employees make engaged employees. Engagement impacts whether an employee is willing to muster the discretionary effort that pushes an organization from surviving to thriving. 

In short, if you want to identify candidates who will perform like Deputy Simmons, you should assess your candidates before giving them a green light for an interview.

Want to learn more about hiring the right way? Check out our guide to crafting next-level talent identification, interviewing, and selection processes

At Hogan we have been warning about widespread use of inaccurate – non-scientifically based – personality tests for decades. When poorly developed hiring assessments are used in high-stakes settings they are damaging to both the individuals being tested and the organizations using them. A newly released HBO Max film highlights the critical importance of using scientifically valid, accurate, and fair personality assessments, like those developed at Hogan. Hogan has always prioritized accuracy, fairness, and constant validation of our assessments above all other factors. On issues of accuracy and fairness, we do not compromise.

At Hogan, we watched the new film with great interest. It discussed many concerns with personality testing and even Industrial/Organizational Psychology as a whole. Unfortunately, the basis for many of those concerns is inaccurate, but we applaud the film’s main premise, which is that non-scientific and discriminatory testing in any form should not be used to make hiring decisions. That point resonates with us. The film also discusses several approaches to personality assessment, although it does not differentiate between scientifically valid and nondiscriminatory kinds of assessments and ones that are neither science-based nor fair, which is disappointing.

Alternatives to hiring assessments

While the film is highly critical of personality assessments, it also never considers the alternatives to personality testing. That is, what if personality tests were not allowed? Two of the most common ways to evaluate job candidates today are the resume review and the interview. It is well-documented that resumes, which contain the applicant’s name and other background characteristics such as schools attended, are subject to discrimination during the review process because a candidate’s sex, gender, and race are often implicitly revealed. And, of course, interviews provide a wealth of information about a candidate’s demographic factors that are not relevant to job performance. As a result, both resume reviews and interviews are well-known to be potential sources of bias and discrimination in the hiring process. The strength of scientifically constructed personality tests is that they are blind to matters of sex, race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. In fact, personality tests have been consistently shown as one of the fairest ways to evaluate candidates for jobs.

The reality is that employers must make judgments about job candidates. The key question omitted by the film is: what is the best way to make those judgments that are both accurate and fair? Abandoning personality testing in favor of resumes and interviews is a recipe for more bias and discrimination. While we appreciate the film drawing attention to the vast array of unscrupulous and harmful test providers on the market, we are disappointed that it failed to recognize the many test providers who provide a fair and accurate way for individuals to be evaluated as job candidates.

We (and many researchers unaffiliated with Hogan) have published research on the accuracy and fairness of our assessments for years. That research is easily accessible to anyone who wants to do their homework on well-developed, appropriately used personality assessments. When considering personality assessments, we urge any potential user to review the research on which they are based and to become fully educated on their appropriate use.

Related Content: Why Free Personality Tests Aren’t Worth the Price

Two decades ago, Robert Hogan, PhD, approached Rosta Benák, an emerging Czech I/O psychologist, about laying the foundation of online personality assessment in Central Europe using the solutions of Hogan Assessments. Thanks to their professional relationship, Assessment Systems was founded. The enthusiasm and professionalism of the Assessment Systems team, combined with a glocal* approach to business and HR consulting, made Assessment Systems the market leader in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Assessment Systems has since earned the long-lasting trust of many satisfied regional and global clients and has become a key player in HR consultancy in the Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) regions.

*Note: “Glocal” is not a typo; it is a global approach with local adaptation.

“Assessment Systems has been our partner in our top management team development, along with our strategic talent management projects, over the last years. They always demonstrated responsible and professional approach with high-quality standards and confidentiality. We highly value the level of client service and engagement, along with high prudence of all of their people.”

—E.L. Pacyna

Deputy Department Director

Head of L&D and Assessment Department of HR Policy

Norilskyi Nikel

Started in the Czech Republic, the Assessment Systems team grew continuously, opening international offices with local staff in Slovakia, Hungary, Serbia, Croatia, Poland, Russia, and Kazakhstan. Currently more than 60 consultants who speak 14 different languages work together to help their clients with talent management. In 2020 alone, Assessment Systems served more than 900 satisfied corporate clients globally, accommodating clients’ needs and helping them navigate changing circumstances caused by the global pandemic.  

“What our clients like the most about Hogan Assessments is that it works! And it works better than anything else out there.”

—Rostislav Benák

Chairman of the Board

“It is amazing and priceless to get such a deep and precise analyses of a personality that allows to develop people and make science-based HR decisions that helps companies reach their strategic goals with fewer mistakes!”

—Aleksey Buryachenko

Managing Partner Russia, Kazakhstan, and CIS

“If you would like to understand the full complexity and nature of someone’s personality, call Hogan. This is the only assessment that is able to show us the controversial nature of people. As one of our clients said: Hogan is so precise as if someone installed cameras in their office and I got the recording.”

—Gábor Füzér

Country Manager, Hungary

Client Case Study: From a Local Project to International Business

Let’s have a look at how it all works in practice with an example of a successful project. It all started when a team at a global management consulting company was looking for a soft-skills development project that would take into account the individuality of each participant. The client was not interested in yet another generic soft-skills training session.

There was no doubt that involving Hogan and working with each participant’s personality assessment results on an individual level would offer what the client desired — and the project was a success. Positive feedback quickly spread to other teams, and Assessment Systems soon started delivering additional training sessions for other multinational teams at all organizational levels. Consultants in or from Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, and Serbia delivered the trainings first for international groups, then later in the local languages for local teams. The sessions covered a big variety of topics, including leadership skills.

Every individual who joined the trainings learned how personality shapes success at work and strategies for individual development. The client liked the “know thyself” style of the trainings so much that they decided to organize a certification workshop for their HR professionals, expanding the use of the Hogan personality assessments to other in-house projects.

Searching for a localized, global solution in the CEE and CIS regions? Contact Assessment Systems.