Insights Combined

Using personality and skills tests to vet potential employees isn’t a new strategy to our company, or to the industry. But a few years ago, Homework Remodels owner, Steve Shinn, and I realized that we needed a more in-depth hiring process in order to lower employee turnover rates. 

Currently, we use a multi-step interview process that requires candidates to take the DiSC assessment, a skills qualification test. We also use the True Colors personality test (my personal favorite). 

Here are three tangible benefits of this process.

1. The Assessment Doesn’t Lie

Coming out of an initial interview, it’s easy to know if you could work well with that person. But it’s important to recognize that in an interview, that person is putting on the absolute best version of themselves, and we cannot always be that best self. 

Using a variety of personality and skills tests has enabled us to step back from our initial assessment and take into consideration a person’s underlying personality—not just the image they present to you. 

2. It’s Easier to Spot a Mismatch in Skills

True Colors has been particularly helpful for us with this, because it’s a lesser known assessment than the popular DiSC or Enneagram tests. True Colors categorizes personality types into four colors—Orange, Gold, Green, and Blue—and emphasizes how each color interacts with other color types. The focus is on creating an environment of collaboration through understanding how people interact with other personalities. 

The skills test we give includes job-specific questions that we are looking for a new employee to have—carpenters won’t get the same questions as administrative assistants, or even as production managers. Combining the interview with the unbiased tests allows us to take into account our gut feeling while also recognizing that certain skills and traits are necessary for someone to succeed in a given role.

3. The Test Results in Longer Tenures

All remodeling companies have been in a situation where
you need a new employee now, and so you have to take the first reasonable candidate you find. We’ve also all had those situations end poorly, and we’re back where we started, in need of a new employee. 

I will not pretend that we haven’t ended up losing an employee, even after they’ve gotten through our process. But when we have, it hasn’t been because we didn’t do our due diligence; for example, our most recent project manager had to leave us due to personal circumstances that neither he nor we could have seen. But there were no hard feelings, because we knew that we had made a solid choice, and recognized that even with this, sometimes life has other plans.