The Dangers of Focusing Too Much (or Too Little) on Personality When You Hire

• You risk hiring a disruptive individual who wreaks havoc without adding value. For example, a leader with exceptional credentials can do significant damage if they’re condescending, controlling, or resistant to change. At some point, their technical capabilities simply don’t matter.  
• You can end up with a team that isn’t aligned with your culture or values. Yet, 72 percent of participants in a PwC global survey said culture can help successful change initiatives happen. Conversely, employees who don’t fit your culture or support your values end up working at cross-purposes. 

On the other extreme lie the companies that allow a candidate’s personality to overshadow the fact that their skills and experience don’t match up with the role’s requirements. Whether consciously or not, they rationalize the candidate’s shortcomings and focus instead on how well they’ll fit in.   

• Your company begins to attract candidates who all “look” the same. And that discourages a more diverse candidate pool from advancing. Yet, diversity of personality is just as important to an organization’s success as diversity of age, gender, or race.  
• Innovation and creativity are stifled. When everyone involved thinks the same, it generally leads to missed opportunities and poor decision-making. For instance, a team of big-picture thinkers will likely latch onto ideas without considering the details, like the cost to produce this new concept or whether it will meet customer expectations.   
• A look-alike workforce can discourage outliers from speaking up, whether the homogeneity is concentrated in one functional group or company-wide. This often happens when a charismatic leader hires direct reports who are just like him or her, building a silo of “mini-me” personalities that often conflict with their peers in other functions. 
• If you primarily hire extroverts (as social media suggests is happening), you’ll find their voices dominating the conversation, often leaving others little time to think and reflect. Eventually, any introverts in the group will stop trying to contribute and even leave the company, taking their talents with them.  

• Be open-minded in developing job requirements. When talent is in short supply, broader competencies and personality traits often become just as important as technical skills, if not more so. Consider whether certain hard skills and experiences are truly must-haves or nice-to-haves for the specific role. Then layer in the soft skills and personality traits that are essential for success in the position.   
• Use a structured interview process. Without structure, interviewers can get caught up in developing rapport and end up favoring a candidate they like personally (or succumbing to other hiring biases). A structured interview process involves carefully crafting questions, asking them consistently across all candidates, and taking detailed notes that will guide the evaluation step later. 
• Involve multiple interviewers, as a panel or sequentially. Some companies even bring in employees who represent the role’s internal customers. By using multiple interviewers, you tap broader perspectives.  
• Broaden the candidate pool. With talent increasingly difficult to find, it’s important to look beyond the same sources you’ve typically considered. Casting a wider net is likely to yield a more diverse group of candidates, both from an experience and personality standpoint.