Personality Traits as Selection Tools in Employment

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Personality Traits as Selection Tools in Employment Personality is a set of enduring traits and characteristics that relate to a person's emotions, motivations, interpersonal interactions, and attitudes. Personality is different from ability. Personality is meaningful to management, because employee’s personalities may dictate how well they perform in their jobs. Personality may indicate how hard a person will work, how organized they are, how well they will interact with others, and how creative they are. Many employers utilize personality tests in the employment selection process to identify people who have more than just the knowledge and skills necessary to be successful in their jobs. The work place is full of people whose personalities are a mismatch for the positions they hold. Additionally, understanding one's own personality characteristics may improve one's ability to develop as an employee and manager. Therefore, it is important to understand the different facets of personality and the ways in which they can be measured. As a group we chose the personality traits of adaptability, conscientiousness, extraversion and openness to experience as our focus for this research paper. Adaptability “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.” – Charles Darwin The first step in the process of evaluating a particular characteristic is to define it, in this case defining what it means to demonstrate adaptability. This must be done prior to testing the candidates. The definition will then be interwoven in the techniques used to assess to the applicants. Some examples of adaptability include: being open minded, handling stress at work well, looking for ways to make improvements rather than falling into the habit of saying why changes won’t work,
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