Leveraging personality profiling in interviews: structured, unstructured and group interviews.
Over the last month we’ve been talking a lot about TALY’s new AI-driven interview tools. This new technology brings hyper-personalised insights for recruitment teams and hiring managers, enabling them to deep dive into topics that actually matter for the candidate and the specific role.
Any new technology that advances the way we work always raises questions. And one question we are getting a lot is… these AI-driven insights are incredibly helpful, but can you help us align them with our current interviewing process?
Most companies, and particularly larger talent acquisition teams, have invested time, energy and money into building an approach to interviewing that helps them get to the right answer in a way that can be systemised across the business.
So today we’re going to deep dive into three common approaches to interviewing to share a couple of insights on easy ways to weave personality – or a new approach to personality - into your discussions.
This month TALY is super excited to announce the launch of TALY’s new, AI-driven candidate interview tool!
The TALY interview tips bring together…
• scientifically-backed personality profiling
• tailored to the needs of your business, culture and the role
• delivered through customised, locally-built AI tools to ensure accuracy
With the new solution, you get simple ideas on what to dive into in the next interview to really dig into candidate fit, and to make sure you’re making the right decision!
And the best part – all TALY personality profiles for recruitment now include these interview recommendations at no extra cost!
Get in touch to find out more about how you can use TALY profiling to give you interview super-powers! Or Book a Demo today to see how easy it is to start using TALY in your business.
Structured interviews
What are they?
Structured interviews are a formal approach to interviewing that builds a set of consistent questions to be used in EVERY interview for a role (and perhaps for all roles). The idea is that if you ask everyone the same questions, you’re building a level playing field that makes for fair comparison across the group.
The pros
Proponents of structured interviews love the consistency across all candidates. It’s simple to deploy and eases the mental load for hiring managers – and means that in the end you can compare apples with apples.
With all candidates being asked the same questions, and given the same opportunities, this can also potentially can help remove bias from the interview process (though there is little research on this, and the questions don’t necessarily help to remove the bias that interviewers bring to how they interpret the answers).
The cons
Research comparing structured vs. unstructured interviews has actually found unstructured interviews to be linked to stronger outcomes.
Furthtermore, even though the questions are consistent for each candidate, each interviewer interprets the questions differently – because they didn’t write them. So, from one person to the next they could be thinking about and looking for a different answer – meaning that even though the question is the same, the outcome can be vastly different.
How personality profiling can help?
The interview is a social situation where two humans need to connect. A higher level of understanding and empathy can help to bridge the gap between the questions, the answers, and the actual meaning or interpretation of the answers.
Valid personality insights, especially those tailored to your specific role and culture, can help to go a long way to creating this empathy…
Helping the hiring manager to build insight on their own point of view and how this impacts on how they are interpreting the questions.
Helping to explore the way a candidate is responding to the questions and the point of view they are bringing.
Facilitating ideas for follow-up questions or for delving deeper into specific topics ensures that you are effectively getting to the heart of the matter.
Unstructured interviews
What are they?
Unstructured interviews, compared to their opposite discussed above, are just what they sound like! These are a more fluid, flexible approaches to interviews that allow the interviewer to follow a line of questioning based on their needs and the candidate – and this may be different for each candidate.
Importantly, these interviews still maintain a level of focus and will lead towards a certain outcome – they are just flexible on the way they get there and allow the interviewer and candidate to shape the flow. These are not just general chats at the pub about the latest footy scores or politics.
The pros
Unstructured interviews can often lead to a more natural, open and mature conversation that allows a rapport to be built between the interviewer and the candidate. Leaders who are experienced or training in interviewing, and who bring along a checklist to make sure the key topic areas are covered off, can often find these to be much more natural discussions and can help them get a better “feel” for the candidate.
As noted above, there is some evidence that unstructured interviews may lead to a higher understanding of the candidate – and therefore better decision making. However, the spectrum of unstructured interviews – from very focused to very loose – can impact on the efficacy of this style.
The cons
Those who don’t support unstructured interviews often cite the pros of structured interviews – a consistent and scalable approach, less burdensome for the hiring manager, less open to bias.
At TALY, we talk about bias a lot! With unstructured interviews, there is a strong risk for bias to have a strong impact – leading to people hiring mini-mes or letting their bias rule their decision making over rational consideration.
How personality profiling can help
In unstructured interviews, personality profiling can play a vital role in a number of key areas…
The independent information helps to reduce the chance of bias taking hold – TA teams and hiring managers can review the data and can ensure this aligns with their perceptions in the interview – and where their bias might be taking hold!
Insights from personality profiling – especially with tools like TALY’s new hyper-individualised interview question – can help to steer the conversation for each candidate, allowing decision makers to deep dive into the most important areas, and to ensure they are confident before moving forward.
As with structured interviews, the hiring managers personality profile can help them identify their ‘blind’ spots, ensuring they craft the conversation in a relevant way.
Group or bulk interviews
What are they?
Bulk interviews or group interviews are an interviewing style that helps to explore applicants for a role at scale. This might be for a large recruitment drive, for a major change, for a specific program (like a graduate program) or for a contingent workforce.
For this interview type, we often hear from decision makers that the information needs for these audiences may be lower – but we would still argue that the impact of a bad hire can still be significant, even with these types of workforces. Here, personality profiling becomes a risk management tool.
The pros
Group or bulk interviews can be a great way to work through a large number of applicants when time and budgets (or sanity) just don’t allow for everyone to be interviewed properly.
Typically there are a defined set of characteristics that will be most important for these roles, and the process is often repeated, so the bulk interviewing process can be a great way to trim the list with a simple focus on these priorities.
The cons
Humans are complex. Some roles may be highly impacted by certain traits – for example, in hospitality, research strongly suggests that reliability, honesty and extroversion are closely linked to positive customer outcomes. But beyond this surface level there are complex characteristics that can play out at work – both that could lead to strong positive or negative outcomes.
In this way, group interviewing can often leave value on the table. It may miss identifying who could be future potential leaders. Or identify the right way to connect with certain individuals to get the most out of them. Or it might miss certain characteristics like high emotionality that could impact on how they deal with certain situations.
Lastly, group interviews will naturally be more suited to certain personality type – those who are comfortable and confident in group settings. Again, this may lead to skew in the personality types that make it through the screening process.
How personality profiling can help
Using personality profiling throughout the recruitment process, including for group interviews, can lead to some great outcomes. Either used early in the screening process to ensure the best mix of people get into the room in the first place, or used throughout the process to ensure each candidate is fully understood, the independent data from profiling can help keep the process on track.
Consider using a streamlined tool as part of the initial screening.
Or AI tools like TALY can help to identify which areas to deep dive into for each candidate without the hiring team needing to go through the mental process for each individual – saving time (and sanity).
Personality profiling in recruitment is proven to drive stronger outcomes in recruitment – and advances in AI technology now make it super easy to weave the insights from personality into whatever interviewing process you are using.
If you want to find out more about leveraging the broad impacts that personality profiling can bring to your business, get in touch today and be sure to follow TALY Australia on LinkedIn.
The TALY approach to personality profiling brings together a unique mix of Five Factor and Emotional Intelligence profiling to help organisations, hiring managers and teams to make better decisions about recruitment and teams.
Get in touch to find out more… we love talking about this stuff! Or Book a Demo today to see how easy it is to start using TALY in your business.