With the uncertain economy hampering the ability of many companies to hire at will, HR executives are working even harder to make sure their managers are making the best hiring decisions they can.

Many companies are currently expanding their interviewing processes to allow more key employees to meet and question job candidates.

While that strategy can add additional insight into the hiring process, some staffing experts say a better alternative might be to increase the use of personality tests to determine if the match between the company and the candidate is a good one.

"In general," says Matt Richburg, consulting vice president of Right Management Consultants in Atlanta, "people even in a down economy are wanting to know more about the folks they are going to hire. Am I getting people that fit with this job and fit with the culture of this organization? In light of recent breaches of integrity, there is a special concern that the hires that are brought in are possessing traits that are not going to compromise standards and do things that reflect poorly on the organization."

Personality testing has been around for decades and even today, as corporations increasingly take advantage of its insights, much of the research behind the tests is from long ago. But while traditional tests required interpretation by clinical psychologists, some testing companies today are refining industrial/career personality screening processes to make the results easier to understand, more relevant to individual companies or job positions and lower in cost--generally $100 or less per person.

It's been accepted for years that some personality characteristics fit certain jobs: sales representatives, for instance, should be enthusiastic and outgoing; financial auditors should be detail-oriented and be able to work independently. But test results may be more worthwhile if the responses of job candidates are compared not with general industrial/occupational values, but directly with the responses of successful employees already within the company or with successful corporate leaders. In other words, the idea behind the newer spate of tests is to, in essence, benchmark for success.

Goodness of Fit

In addition to the usefulness of such benchmarking tests as hiring tools, the findings on strengths and weaknesses are helpful to the candidates in their own career growth and development.

Also, because many tests are completed online, they offer the added benefits of almost instantaneous results and easy access. Using such technology offers some security concerns, however, as well as potential difficulty for test-takers who are not yet comfortable with the technology.

Another potential downside is the test's inability to measure a candidate's practical skills as well as his or her flexibility to work smoothly in today's fluid corporate world.

Personality testing really responds to the question of the "goodness of fit," says psychologist, author and management consultant Susan Battley, founder and CEO of Battley Performance Consulting of Stony Brook, N.Y.

There's an old expression, says Battley, who also is a clinical associate professor in the School of Health Technology and Management at the State University of New York at Stony Brook: Companies "hire for skills but the whole person turns up for work." Personality testing helps companies understand the whole person and how they fit into a specific workplace as well as a specific job.

National Distributing Co., based in Atlanta, turned to "CP Screen," an online assessment tool from the ComputerPsychologist Inc., also based in Atlanta, to "do a better job matching employee traits and abilities against the requirements of our jobs," says Bruce Carter, vice president of human resources for the large distributor of alcoholic beverage products.

The company, which employs 2,800 workers in 18 locations, started using the testing for positions that involved "high customer-service interaction," moving on to other positions like warehouse workers, who must be suited for "routine and monotonous" work, and then sales representatives. Most recently, the company decided to use the benchmark testing in its hiring of sales managers and front-line, first-level supervisory positions in the company's office in Tampa, Fla.

To create the benchmark against which job candidates were measured, Scott Green, human resource manager of the Tampa office, first had to decide which criteria best indicated top-performing sales managers. He eventually decided on managers whose performance evaluations were rated above average for the past two years, who exceeded goals for the past two years and who rated highly on 360-degree feedback assessments. Then, those 18 managers were asked to take 45-minute online personality profile tests that measured 16 core personality traits as well as cognitive abilities.

"From that, we developed a template of ideal traits that these top performers had," says Green. "When we assess anyone who is a candidate, [we] compare them with the similarity index. The way I look at it, when you put [personality traits] into action, they end up being behaviors.

"Quite frankly, the tool has caught on so successfully that we have to discourage [hiring managers] from giving it too much emphasis," he says. "People believe in the tool and there is a tendency to give it too much weight instead of doing an effective interview." The similarity index comparison should be used in conjunction with interviews, past experience and references, he says.

Career Development

Offering a different type of benchmarking is the recently released Coaching Report for Leaders, which is based on the CPI 260, a product of Consulting Psychologists Press Inc. of Palo Alto, Calif., best known for distributing such widely known psychological tests as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and the Strong Interest Inventory.

This coaching report takes its benchmarking data from a group of 5,600 managers and executives who attended the leadership development program from 1995 to 1996 at the Center for Creative Leadership in Greensboro, N.C. "This test can help inform a decision if you are talking about selecting someone into an organization or inviting them to continue [with the company]. Certainly, the idea is to try to place some sort of objective and standardized process to the decision-making process," says Robert Devine, who helped create the test and now works with CPP as an independent contractor to help test-takers analyze the test results. The test is a "snapshot of your leadership characteristics," he says, in areas such as self-management, organizational capabilities, team-building and teamwork, problem-solving and sustaining the vision.

Reviewing the results with either a test specialist or a qualified HR professional is important, he says. "You [the test-taker] need to go through this report and accept or reject what is in [it]," Devine says. "There are no ideal results, and change is the point."

HR's role is to identify employees with potential who should take the test, and to explain to them that the data won't be used for personnel decisions, but instead will help the employee understand his or her strengths and weaknesses, he says. "The whole idea is [to let the employee know] that, 'We value you and are willing to spend the money to make you better,' " Devine says.

Test results are not a panacea, however. Devine recalls a recent conversation in which a manager was astonished to discover that an employee scored tremendously high in all categories of the leadership coaching report. On a day-to-day basis, that employee was in dire need of help in all areas. While testing measures personality, it does not measure the practical results of that personality. So it's important to remember, Devine says, that testing "is one source of information. It's not all the information."

Skewed Results

Personality tests may well do their best work in selecting out candidates rather than selecting them in, says Chuck Russell, author of Right Person-Right Job: Guess or Know--The Breakthrough Technologies of Performance Information.

Benchmarking tests, in particular, he says, are very dependent on the people the company classifies as its top performers--and if it miscalculates there, the test results are useless. One company, he says, made such a mistake. It used sales numbers as the basis for selecting the top sales representatives who would create the personality benchmark for new hires. Unfortunately, the data was skewed because some of those top performers made or exceeded goals because of long-time relationships with clients--relationships they did not establish themselves--while the company was looking for personalities capable of finding and selling to new clients.

Another potential downside to benchmarking tests, Russell says, is they are geared to a stable job position, something that is becoming rarer in today's mobile, reactive and agile business world. Plus, he says, companies must be alert to the possibility that a candidate who scores very high on a test, and may be below the waterline on only one item, could indicate a candidate with a "fatal flaw," making him or her unable to perform well in the organization.

That's not to say Russell isn't an advocate of testing. He is, although he believes benchmarking tests "are a little simplistic." He wants companies to understand that all tests have limitations in what they measure, and selecting the right test is crucial for good results.

Richburg of Right Management recalls a professional services firm that decided to use a test that gave high marks for values that "flat out went against the values of the organization," such as highly rating "opportunistic" selling methods when the company instead valued methods based on relationships, he says. The organization "had to be very careful about how they interpreted" the test results. "The best practice," he says, "is to evaluate the test to make sure it is a valid assessment of the competencies and aligned with the culture of the organization."

In order to get to the point of selecting a valid test, HR executives must first educate corporate leaders, who often dismiss the value of such personality tests, says Battley. They also need to fight against the concern of some companies "about introducing anything that smacks of a psychological test."

To do this, HR executives need to show the value to the company--the monetary value--in improved retention, in performance and in reducing the cost of remedial training when the company discovers it hired the wrong person, she says. Then, there is the "ripple effect" of a poor hire on the rest of an organization, especially when the person is at a senior level, as well as the amount of unproductive time other managers must expend in addressing the difficulties raised by a poor hire. "Once [business leaders] see the value of tests, they are on board," Battley says.

As for the online delivery, companies need to ensure that job candidates don't ask others to take the test for them. One way to prevent that is by announcing the company may discuss test responses during the interview, says Shelly Funderburg, director of employee selection systems for Milwaukee-based Manpower Inc., which partnered with SHL, a UK company that offers various online behavioral skills assessments.

Most tests, also, have a scale known as the "social desirability scale," a measurement indicating when candidates "fake good," Funderburg says. Scientifically valid tests prevent that phenomenon by asking the same question in different ways to determine if the pattern of responses indicates falsehood.

HR professionals need to thoroughly review the online test--making sure they take it themselves--to be sure the directions are easily understood. Companies also should offer test-takers the option of using paper and pen instead of an online version.

Test results should be kept private, and some companies prefer to keep the electronic results within the HR department, printing out a copy of the results only for the hiring manager as a way to prevent easy transmission of the data. Companies also need to decide if they will destroy and keep the results of candidates who are not hired, and whether candidates--successful or not--will have the opportunity to review the results.

At National Distributing, the company sees the benchmarking tests as "such an integral part of our hiring process that we anticipate even expanding [use of] the tool" to more and more job positions, says Carter.

"This gives us a definite competitive advantage in our ability to feel better about selection decisions of the right fit, and every opportunity we have to maximize success, we want to take advantage of," he says.