Posted by Josh Millet on Tue, Apr 14, 2009 @ 07:02 PM
In my last post I described our customer service test and the kinds of personality traits that it measures. People who have high levels of cooperativeness, patience, and personal diplomacy tend to be well suited for customer service roles. The use of personality tests is even more widespread, however, in helping select salespeople, because there's a lot of research that shows that people with certain personality traits tend to be successful in sales roles across a wide range of industries. Most personality tests that are designed to help select salespeople look for outgoing, fairly aggressive people that tend to be competitve and highly motivated. This general profile of a stereotypical sales professional is probably not all that surprising. But what kinds of research underlies this type of "sales profiling?"
The sales aptitude test featured in HireSelect is called the Sales Achievement Predictor. The professors who created the test validated it in part by comparing the 15 personality traits it measures to job performance data for various samples of salespeople. The highest performing salespeople tended to be competitive, outgoing, highly motivated, assertive individuals. For example, in a sample of 156 real estate sales professionals whose test scores were compared to their job performance, the highest correlations were observed in the following traits: Achievement, Motivation, Initiative, Assertiveness, Competitveness, Goal-Orientation, and Extraversion (the correlations were .53, .43, .42, .38, .38, and .36, respectively.) Interestingly, low or even negative correlations were observed for Cooperativeness and Patience, suggesting that when it comes to sales being too patient or too cooperative can sometimes be a liability rather than an asset. We've conducted numerous case studies with our customers that essentially confirm these findings: the most successful salespeople tend to be competitive, assertive, and relatively impatient individuals--in short, nearly the opposite of the type of people who are best suited to customer service. To be sure, the type of personality that is best suited for a particular sales role can vary from one organziation to another, and from one industry to another, depending on the nature of the sales process and the sales culture in a given environment. But the basic building blocks of what personality traits you should look for in selecting sales people are remarkably consistent across all industries.
Click here to read more about our sales aptitude test.
Posted by Josh Millet on Wed, Jun 04, 2008 @ 02:02 PM
To finish off our discussion about personality tests, I wanted to discuss ways in which test developers are moving beyond the Big Five. The Big Five is sometimes too broad to predict work behaviors for specific jobs, where more fine-grained personality measures may be useful. For example, it has been shown that certain jobs such as sales positions are best performed by people with a set of personality characteristics that correspond to the work activities involved in sales jobs. Sales jobs often require cold-calling, initiating social interactions, prospecting, and building relationships. It won't be surprising to most people that qualities like assertiveness, extraversion, competitiveness, and self-confidence might be qualities that could help an individual perform well in such roles. For work in the field of customer service, on the other hand, qualities such as patience, cooperativeness, and personal diplomacy would be most important given the job activities of most customer service positions.
Because there is growing evidence of the predictive validity of personality measures for jobs such as sales and customer service, many test publishers have developed employment personality tests focused on these areas. For example, Criteria has a sales aptitude test and a customer service test that measure 18 different personality traits that predict performance in these jobs. These tests can have far greater utility than a Big-Five based test for a given position, because they provide much more targeted and fine-grained information based on the specific requirements of a given job. Because they have been customized to specific positions, the score reports for such tests are also typically easier to interpret than are general Big Five inventories. As personality research continues to advance, expect to see targeted, job-specific personality tests for a much wider range of positions in years ahead.