- Key insight: Discover how personality testing can align benefits with workforce motivations and retention drivers.
- What's at stake: Poor benefit alignment risks higher turnover and mismatched recruitment investments.
- Expert quote: Personality reveals learning agility, adaptability and stress tendencies. — Allison Howell, Hogan Assessments
Source: Bullets generated by AI with editorial review
When benefit managers understand both their workforce population's strengths and where employees may need extra support, they can design programs that
Personality tests can be one way to build this awareness. Benefit managers can integrate them into their
Hogan Assessments, a suite of personality assessments, was started by a group of researchers in the 1960s to help remove discrimination from hiring. Since then, it has grown to include four test options: How people behave at their best; where they become weak under pressure; identifying motives, values and unconscious biases that impact career decisions and work preferences; and problem-solving and decision-making skills. Assessments can be adapted to different industries and recruitment styles, as well as higher volume versus specific candidate comparisons.
"Hogan has built a huge data archive showing the link between personality and performance," says Allison Howell, Hogan's VP of market innovation. "Personality can tell you a lot about a person's ability to learn, ability to adapt, their coachability, and the tendencies they have under stress."
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How personalities impact benefits
These assessments have been utilized to help individuals and teams identify shortcomings which they can then work on improving. But benefit managers can mine these results to understand employees' values and motivations, and then align benefits to meet those thresholds.
"You're able to look at benefits that you're offering and organizational values, and see where employees might line up with that," Howell says. "And if you have some people who are struggling to stay engaged or wanting to negotiate, you can go back and say, 'What is going to hook them in?'"
When assessments are given as part of onboarding or to existing talent, results can be shared with internal coaches, mentors and managers to create impactful learning and development opportunities, Howell says.
"It helps to identify a baseline and potential areas to watch out for," Howell explains. "It's also beneficial to say, 'OK, this is somebody who's really motivated to learn more, so we're going to make sure they are able to access ongoing training programs,' or, 'Their ambition levels are so high that we know to get them on a career path so that they can grow.'"
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Beyond professional development, people's assessments can reveal motivators that can influence other benefit areas: From offerings and programs that cater to their wellness, to those that create connections within the workplace or foster a creative culture, personality tests can point benefit leaders in the right direction.
"With the menu of benefits that employers can offer, there might be some things that go beyond compensation," Howell says. "[These types of things] might be more valuable to an individual employee than is obvious at first; there's a lot of insight you can get in order to hire, retain and keep employees engaged."
Read more about how to build customized benefits:
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