The Importance of Personality Profiles in Hiring
By Sarah McKee-Harris, Founder of Lighthouse Executive Ltd & Team Ambition Limited (Feb 2025)
The hiring process is crucial for shaping an organisation’s future and achieving its growth plans but it’s essential to find candidates who not only have the right skills but also fit the company culture and team dynamics. This is where DiSC personality profiling come in.
Alongside Lighthouse Executive, Founder, Sarah McKee-Harris also leads, Team Ambition (www.team-ambition.co.uk), a firm that specialises in working with hiring managers looking to identify the best candidates for their vacancy, by assessing personality fit for the role and the team culture/dynamics they are joining. There are multiple benefits of using this simple to access, low-cost, search and selection tool in the interview process, of which we look at some below:
Looking Beyond Skills: Assessing Cultural Fit
Technical skills are important, but they are only part of the equation. A candidate might have the right skills but struggle to fit into the team or adapt to the company culture. Personality profiles help you understand how a candidate will navigate your workplace environment and contribute positively. This will help both sides have a smoother onboarding and integration experience when joining the company. The 2024 CIPD Resourcing and Talent report found that retaining new recruits is a major issue for many organisations: 41% of those that selected candidates in the last 12 months said new recruits always, mostly or sometimes resigned within the first 12 weeks! Introducing personality profiling can help significantly reduce this happening.
Predicting Performance and Job Satisfaction
Personality profiles offer insights into how candidates handle challenges, communicate, and collaborate. These traits impact job performance and satisfaction. Aligning a candidate’s personality with the role’s demands increases the chances of successful onboarding and long-term satisfaction.
Effective Team Composition
A diverse team is vital for a thriving organisation. Personality profiles help create teams that complement each other’s strengths and offset weaknesses. A mix of personalities enhances creativity, problem-solving, and resilience.
Reducing Turnover
Turnover is costly and disruptive. Poor fit between employee and organisation is a leading cause. Personality profiles provide a clearer picture of a candidate’s fit, reducing turnover rates. In 2023, the average cost of replacing an employee in the UK was around £25,000 per worker, which accounts for rehiring and lost productivity. For specialist and senior roles, this number can range higher, think £40,000 to £100,000 per head!
Ethical Considerations
Using reliable and validated assessment tools ensures fairness and equal opportunity. Transparency in using personality assessments and obtaining informed consent is crucial for maintaining ethical standards.
In modern recruitment, personality profiles are powerful tools that go beyond traditional resume evaluations. They help you make strategic hiring decisions, leading to better team dynamics, job performance, and organisational success. Diversity isn’t just about physical differences in people, by having a diverse workforce in terms of personalities in the team, you can benefit from different ideas and approaches to work resulting in innovation, growth and improvement in productivity, turnover and profitability.
So, as you can see by introducing one extra stage to your recruitment process, the business will benefit in a multitude of ways, these examples are just the tip of the iceberg as once the best personality fit is hired and onboard there are many more gains as DiSC personality profiling is fully embedded in to the team in terms of better communication, less conflict, increased productivity to name but a few!
To find out how Lighthouse Executive and Team Ambition can help you hire the best candidate fit, contact Sarah McKee-Harris today for a confidential, no-obligation chat today – sarah@lighthouse-executive.co.uk / 01206 984042.