Assessing candidates’ personalities during recruitment and selection processes is much harder than assessing their skills. Yet, personality is crucial for a good fit. Hiring is an exceptionally complex and very stressful process, which can result in engaging the best people or end up in a disaster. Often times, we focus more on people skills than the human factor. That human factor, however, is sometimes the most important factor.

Of course we take all the necessary steps every time, perform initial screenings, tests on all levels, hire psychologists and parapsychologists, check the background, consult our colleagues and talk to carefully selected candidates.

And yet, despite everything, sometimes we end the whole story successfully and sometimes in a way that makes us rack our brains months later and wonder what we missed and where we made a mistake.

The Beginning
Let’s start from the beginning. Common practise is hiring via job ad on some net portal or printed media. We expect a huge amount of applicants here. Quality candidates. My personal experience, next to other colleagues’ experiences, is not quite like that. Concerning quantity, there are usually no fails. The quality fails almost regularly.

Well, it is our professional and moral responsibility to properly check all applications, to devote them the needed attention and evaluate every one of them positively or negatively. While evaluating, we analyse the job’s demands, needed skills, academic education, work experience, specific skills etc. After finishing the first screening/reading, we go over to round two of a merciless fight for the best candidate, which will thrill us with their skills and, above all, loyalty.

Round two has begun, the concentration is on its maximum, unseen dedication and we read, we observe, we analyse. In a sea of epic professional successes, we distinguish reality from what is only its idealistic presentation. Let’s say we managed (or we hope so) to find out what is real and what is not and make a list of candidates we are going to meet, test, talk to. We are careful, it’s an important list. We invite candidates to a meeting in our company’s headquarter.