By Kellie Lail
So you’re looking to add a new member to your team. That’s great! But how are you going to utilize the IdealTraits assessment to ensure that you are picking the best fit for your agency? First, you have to decide what you’re looking for. Do you have a star performer that you wish you could clone? Are you missing something on your team but you just aren’t sure what it is? First you need to understand what you already have right in front of you.
Let’s imagine that your agency has been growing over the last few months and you are in need of another sales representative to help you maintain your growth. But, you’re also going to need another member of staff to help service accounts as your book of business continues to grow. You aren’t exactly sure who you should be looking for, but Stacy is your top sales person and Bill is a great CSR; if you could only clone them your team would be set.
If you don’t know Bill and Stacy’s personality types and why they work so well together, it is going to be more difficult to replicate how awesome they are in your future employees. That’s where we come in.
Now that you are a professional at reading and understanding the performance index of the personality profile, it’s time to put your knowledge to use. You have learned how to break down high, mid-range, and low personality scores, but how do you get a good idea of what these results will look like in your office specifically? The most efficient way to understand how certain personalities will perform in your office, while gaining a deeper understanding of what each personality looks like in action, is to assess your current staff.
With an active IdealTraits subscription, you have the ability to send out as many assessments as you’d like at no additional cost. This means you can easily assess yourself and your current staff to find out what kind of personalities you have in the office. To learn how to manually add candidates or current staff to complete the assessment, check out this article in our Help Center.
Once you have sent the assessment out to your team, it’s time to take a look at their results and break them down. Start by looking at the personality results for your star performer. Keep in mind, this goes beyond looking at just the personality type or summary; you want to take a look at the Performance Index scores itself. Just like any other time reading a personality result, you want to focus on their scores Under Pressure.
With this being your star performer, ideally, you want to replicate these results when hiring for another seat in that same role. Remember, just because you have a star performer in sales, doesn’t necessarily mean they would be a star performer in a service role. Different personality results and performance index scores result in different strengths and areas of opportunity. For example, someone with a high score in Motivation and Drive and Persuasive and Convincing can be well suited for a sales role because they are likely to be direct, decisive, competitive, willing to take risks, animated, enthusiastic, outgoing, trusting, influential, and optimistic. Someone with high Structure and Routine and high Thorough and Compliance may be a better fit for a service or administrative role because they are likely to be very steady, routine oriented, good listeners, strict rule followers, great planners, and make their decisions based on fact.
This is why it is so important to assess every member of your staff, including yourself. Assessing everyone on your team allows you have an example of results to compare your applicants to, no matter what position you are looking to fill at any given time. You also want to utilize the assessment as a way to baseline things like sales ability, communication skills, ambition, and confidence. The assessment can help you to:
- Ensure you’re placing staff in the right positions.
- Identify strengths and weaknesses in staff.
- Maximize communication.
- Minimize conflict.
- Understand the best training path for each person.
- Build strong teams.
- Fill the holes that exist in your current team.
Not only is the assessment a great pre-screening tool, but it can also be an incredible management tool. Just as the assessment tells you a candidate’s strengths and areas of opportunity before they begin, the assessment can help you to identify areas where your current employees excel or where they may need some support. This provides you with an opportunity to not only replicate personality types in your new hires, but to identify areas in your team as a whole that might need filled. This can help you to identify complementary personalities in your new hires, helping you to round out the team.