Sometime in the future, robots may replace all workers, even IT workers. When that time comes, employee personality won’t matter. If a robot worker doesn’t fit in, you’ll just have them reprogrammed. Until that time comes, though, employees are people, not robots. Personalities can’t simply be reprogrammed, and an employee whose personality doesn’t fit in can have a surprisingly large impact on the rest of the team.

Conflict With Employees and Job Responsibilities

There can be a personality conflict between employees and their bosses, between employees and their co-workers, and even between employees and their customers. All of these conflicts make it difficult to work together to achieve the goal of a project. Conflicts with customers can even result in a company’s losing business.

Even if an employee’s personality doesn’t cause conflict with others in the workplace, it can get in the way of performing the job. For example, a very introverted worker wouldn’t be a suitable fit for a position that requires lots of public interaction, even if they are experts in every technical skill the job needs.

Assess Personality Before Hiring the Candidate

To ensure the candidate has the right personality for the job, make sure your hiring process doesn’t focus only on technical skills. Certainly, keywords on a resume may suggest you should bring in the candidate for an interview, and the interview should prove the candidate’s expertise in those skills. But the interview is also a time to evaluate the candidate’s soft skills and interpersonal capabilities.

Personality tests can rate candidates on measures including intro- or extroversion and ability to lead or propensity to follow, and behavioral interview questions can help you understand how the employee would react in specific situations they’re likely to encounter at work. You can also learn about the candidate’s personality by finding out how they spend their free time away from work.

Because the candidate will likely work as part of a team, have more than one person interview them. Getting multiple perspectives from different members of the team will give you a sense of how well they’ll fit in to your organization.

Work With a Staffing Agency

Staffing agencies like InReach understand both the formal qualifications needed for a job as well as the personal characteristics needed to succeed. With our 20 years of experience and a deep pool of potential hires, we can help you find a candidate who will excel both technically and personally. Contact the Dallas IT staffing professionals at InReach to learn more about our services.