MERITPROFILE
Character and Behavior AssessmentThe Case for Character Assessment
Smart companies have already been forging ahead with interview approaches that are asking open-ended questions designed to learn something about a candidate's character as part of the hiring process. They have sensed the need for the development of new tools that can help them get that done, and now they have such a tool, the MERIT Profile™.
At the root of the issue is a simple and important question: Does character have anything to do with success and if so is it quantifiable and something that can be added to the tools already in place to make better hiring and promotion decisions? This question has caused search firms and related service providers to rethink the filters used in the recruitment and interviewing process. In fact, we are on the frontier now of experiencing potentially major shifts in what is being measured in the interview process.
So why has it taken so long to introduce character-oriented assessment tools into the mainstream of the hiring process? There are probably three main reasons:
- Unlike observable behaviors, character is often viewed as an intangible that cannot be easily correlated with desired business outcomes. That makes using such tools seem hard to defend in our litigious society.
- Until recent years, there has not been enough business failure associated with proven character collapse to get our attention. This is changing, as companies of all sizes have become public examples of what can happen when the necessary character safeguards are not in place.
- Until the popularization of more empirical studies associated with emotional quotient (Daniel Goleman and many others), it has not been widely understood how character can be measured and what influence it has on business.
