A leopard can't change its spots, but an employee can

BUSINESS

In the game of recruitment, personality plays a big role. Next to criminal background checks, a “high score” on a personality profilemakes up more than 45% of the recruiter’s final decision.As a leader in my field, I’ve pretty much trained throughout my whole career to read people – their quirks, their edge, their humour, their work ethic, even their hidden agendas.

Is it fun? Yes and no.The blessing and the curse of knowing how to read another human being is that you’re always (generally) one step ahead of the moment, but, on the flip side, you’re also – always – pre-empting the outcome of an interaction, when you should be fully present inside it.One thing I know for sure, companies today will spend fortunes on personality profiling of their employees, their candidates and – yes – even their own families (sometimes!) just to figure out where “this person” fits in, or if they will fit in at all.And why shouldn’t they, when the person they’re hiring will be spending eight hours a day, five days a week for almost a year in their boardroom, in their open-plan office, on Zoom calls and/or in the company kitchen.