Talent Connection Blog

When hiring managers and recruiters use their discretion to overrule the results of personality assessment tests, their hires do less well than workers selected exclusively on the basis of test scores, according to TLNT.com. This information is based on the data gathered by a trio of researchers—Mitchell Hoffman of the University of Toronto’s School of Management, Lisa Kahn of Yale’s School of Management, and Danielle Li of Harvard Business School—who studied the tenure and performance of 300,000 hires at 15 different companies. It was concluded that managers who exercise more discretion systematically end up with worse hires.

More recently, this conclusion has been backed up by another round of research— a research paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research states that, at least for low-skilled work such as data entry or call center professions, personality assessment testing improves job tenure by 15 percent. According to the data, human intervention was strongly correlated with poorer results.

Don’t worry, this doesn’t mean that managers and recruiters are completely obsolete; but they are only human, and humans have a tendency to be biased, whether they want to be or not.  And according to that trio of researches we mentioned, bias equals poor judgement. They agreed, “Managers exercise discretion because they are biased or have poor judgement, not because they are better informed.” So, now the question is, are you utilizing the successful hiring capabilities that personality assessments have to offer?

If this question is puzzling you, remember that Talexes is your one-stop hub of talent management solutions, so you can be sure that you hire the right candidates every time.