Most good business decisions have an associated return on investment (ROI). If you purchase a piece of equipment that increases output by 50% with the same labor, then the ROI calculation seems simple. An investment in marketing that drives a 20% increase in new customers is similarly easy. But what about initiatives tied to personality assessments? How do we transition from framing personality assessment as part of the “soft” and “fuzzy” world of HR and OD into the concrete, bottom-line world of finance and real ROI? If your organization is contemplating making an investment in the use of personality assessments,…

It seems like everyone is either talking about or already using personality assessments. Emerging demographic shifts and the accompanying tight labor market mean that personality assessments have shifted from the rare “nice to have” to a common and critical tool for finding, retaining, and developing the right talent. This shift marks the use of personality assessments as something substantially more than a recent uptick, instead approaching what futurist and best-selling author Daniel Burrus defines as a hard trend or “future certainty”. But while the adoption of personality assessments might be inevitable, the successful application of personality assessments is less certain.…