Predicting work behaviors and employee retention with assessments derived from the Big 5

The Big-5 methodology is a leading assessment method for employees developed in the 1980s and used by thousands of companies. It is the only psychometric test and personality model that reaches a scientific consensus in personality psychology.

Huneety has further improved the Big-5 Assessment system to adapt to a wider variety of work behaviors and offer a comprehensive offer of ready-to-send assessments.

Origins of The Big-5 test

The Big-5 assessment aims to capture five dimensions of personality traits that are widely used in modern psychological research. The Big-5 first emerged in the early 1960s, created by Tupes and Christal, after running tests with eight large samples and discovering five recurring factors in personality. The test defines personality traits itself as unique character qualities that one builds and grow as an individual.

Now, what are the Big-5 traits?

Extraversion

is a capability of excitement, talkative, assertive, and emotionally expressive character. Socialize with others boost them in getting excited and more enthusiastic.

Openness

enjoy experiencing new things, and regularly have an interest in many things allowing them to get creative and imaginative. Insightful in conversation. 

Agreeableness

demonstrates a person's capability to get along with others. People with this trait are commonly found sympathetic, kind, and affectionate. 

Neuroticism

 is a personality trait of a person's capability to control emotion (sometimes called Emotional Stability). Some of the traits are temperamental, uneasy, and tense. It is also defined by its opposite: calm and tranquility.

Conscientiousness

describes a person’s capability on keeping things organized. These traits include being on time, goal-oriented, and hardworking.

Using Big 5 questionnaire techniques to detect work behaviors

As mentioned, the Big-5 is scientifically used to determine people’s ability to work in a social scenario. Work in itself is one of those scenarios, the Big-5 can therefore be applied to better understand people’s performance at the workplace in terms of process and environment. In that context, the Big-5 becomes a descriptive framework to predict the future of a candidate fit to adapt to their new assigned position. 

Involving big data and proprietary questionnaires, Huneety adapted the Big-5 to assess behavior in job candidates. Work behaviors fall into 3 main categories which are Cognitive Skills, which measure the agility of a candidate in thinking and solving a problem, Self Leadership Skills, which measure how a candidate directs themselves into reaching a goal and making decisions, and Interpersonal Skills, which measure how well a candidate in building trust and relationship with others.

Using these three main categories, Huneety analyzes candidates into more than 20 types of work-related sub-behaviors. The feedback from this analysis results in 4 or more work preferences or habits to identify the best candidates in a talent pool.

Why the Big 5 Methodology is suited for the recruitment process?

Unbiased by design

The Big-5 assessment method is unbiased by design. Unlike candidate screening by a person (resume screening or phone call) or by A.I (which may sometimes prove unreliable on unstructured resume data), here all candidates receive the very same set of questions and are able to answer without any intermediaries. It is therefore free of any gender, age, and ethnicity bias and focuses solely on behavior fit.

Resistant to “cheating”

In general, there are no “right or wrong answers” for the candidates as the test only tries to idenfiy dominating work style behaviors.  To go further, the candidates are timed and the question order is fully randomized, so candidates can’t know which behavior they are answering for. This overall approach prevents candidates from “optimizing” the results of their test for a particular outcome. 

Weighting work behaviors

The ranking system of the Big 5 assessment weights questions differently in their contribution to each behavior. The test remains opaque to the candidate but becomes transparent to the HR user once consolidated and reordered. HR can then easily simply look at consolidated scores or get a glimpse at the questions that contributed to the score.

Based on a proven weighting statistical model

Huneety uses the same statistical model as the Big-5 psychometric assessment in order to consolidate and rank the results of the participants. The International Personality Item Pool (IPIP) is a public domain collection of items for use in personality tests and is managed by the Oregon Research Institute (https://www.ori.org). 

Here is how IPIP scales are scored:

For “plus”/”positive” keyed items, the response “Very Inaccurate” is assigned a value of 1, “Moderately Inaccurate” a value of 2, “Neither Inaccurate nor Accurate” a 3, “Moderately Accurate” a 4, and “Very Accurate” a value of 5.

For “minus”/”negative” keyed items, the response “Very Inaccurate” is assigned a value of 5, “Moderately Inaccurate” a value of 4, “Neither Inaccurate nor Accurate” a 3, “Moderately Accurate” a 2, and “Very Accurate” a value of 1.

Our design process for optimal accuracy

Questionnaires crafted by experts

In creating and validating questions, Huneety employs experts to ensure of their accuracy. Our tests are written and reviewed by psychometricians and HR professionals. Questions are developed and incorporated as set to ensure the right balance for every behavior with a minimum of 5 questions per behavior. Each is carefully selected and weighted according to the IPIP scale.

Continuous optimization based on Big Data

As part of a continuous improvement process, Huneety’s data science team reviews anonymized questionnaire data to refine the questions available in the system to ensure the long-term validity of questionnaires in each country and language. This allows companies to get access to statistically verified questionnaire data without the hassle of maintaining their own question base.

Qualitative cross-examination during the interview

To enrich our reports, Huneety also provides “suggested interview questions” which are directly connected to the expected behaviors and candidate’s answers. The Interview questions can be used for interviewers to get “qualitative” answers and verify the “quantitative” analysis offered by the multiple choice questionnaire by enquiring about low or high scores.