Candidate Selection: A Definitive Guide
Learn of candidate selection to improve your candidate selection process and build a high-performing workforce.
Hiring the right employees isn’t just about skills and experience, it’s about finding people with the right traits to succeed in your organisation. But with so much research on workplace performance and personality, it’s not always clear which qualities matter most.
To cut through the complexity, this article outlines the five most important traits to look for when hiring, backed by research and industry best practices.
When it comes to predicting real-world job performance, cognitive ability is the strongest indicator of success—especially for roles that require problem-solving, decision-making, and learning new skills quickly.
Cognitive ability refers to a person’s capacity to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, and learn from experience. It’s especially important in professional, technical, and managerial positions, where employees must process complex information and adapt to new challenges.
Cognitive ability is best measured using psychometric tests, which assess key thinking skills such as:
These tests work best when used together to provide an overall measure of general cognitive ability—the single best predictor of job performance across all industries.
That’s where an online assessment platform comes in. Whether used as a standalone tool or integrated with your ATS, an online provider makes cognitive testing efficient, scalable, and stress-free.
Overall, this makes ability tests the most useful tools, and it makes cognitive ability the most important individual quality to look for when hiring.
Conscientiousness is one of the most important personality traits when hiring. It underpins how focused, diligent, dutiful, and thorough someone is in their work. In fact, it’s the most studied personality trait in occupational psychology, with strong evidence supporting its role in predicting job performance, reliability, and work ethic.
Many hiring teams look for qualities like “strong work ethic” and “attention to detail” in their hiring criteria. Both of these constructs are core aspects of conscientiousness. So when looking for qualities of a productive employee, conscientiousness is the trait to focus on.
The best way to assess conscientiousness is through personality questionnaires, particularly those built on the Big Five Model of Personality. Our personality assessments measure conscientiousness directly, breaking it down into five key sub-traits:
Unlike interviews, which often fail to measure personality traits reliably, online personality questionnaires provide a consistent, scalable, and data-driven way to assess conscientiousness. Breaking conscientiousness down into its five sub-traits offers valuable insights into each candidate’s character, helping you understand not just if they are conscientious, but how they demonstrate it in the workplace.
Resilience plays a critical role in both performance and well-being at work, making it an essential quality to look for in new hires. Employees with high resilience can handle stress, recover from setbacks, and stay focused under pressure, preventing burnout and maintaining productivity.
This trait is particularly valuable in high-pressure roles such as management, sales, and customer service, where employees frequently face challenges, rejection, or demanding workloads. Read our article on why resilience is important in the workplace.
Resilience isn’t a single trait—it’s built from a combination of personality factors, including:
Unlike other hiring criteria, employers have an ethical responsibility to ensure candidates have the resilience needed to succeed in their role. Hiring someone without the ability to manage workplace stress puts them at risk of burnout, disengagement, and stress-related illness—ultimately affecting both their well-being and job performance.
Test Partnership’s personality questionnaires assess a candidate’s resilience as well as their emotional stability. When hiring for a role that requires high resilience, you can easily identify which candidates have the personality traits best suited for the job.
By incorporating personality assessments that measure resilience-related traits, hiring teams can identify candidates who are better equipped to handle pressure, adapt to challenges, and thrive in demanding environments.
Emotional intelligence is a person’s ability to recognise, understand, and manage emotions—both in themselves and in others. It plays a crucial role in workplace success by improving interpersonal relationships, communication, and emotional regulation.
Employees with high emotional intelligence work well with colleagues, customers, and stakeholders, reducing conflict and strengthening teamwork. They also regulate their own emotions, avoiding counterproductive emotional reactions in high-pressure situations.
Although emotional intelligence has an interpersonal component, it is not effectively measured in interviews. Instead, personality questionnaires provide a more reliable, structured, and scalable way to assess this trait.
At Test Partnership, our personality questionnaire measures emotional intelligence across four key areas:
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How we're differentIndustriousness refers to a person’s drive, motivation, and tenacity in working towards their goals. While it’s closely linked to conscientiousness, the difference lies in how these traits manifest:
This trait is critical for roles with targets, quotas, or measurable performance outcomes, such as sales, management, or high-accountability positions.
Industriousness is best measured using a personality questionnaire, as interviews will inevitably yield inaccurate or even deceptive results. Naturally, a highly skilled interviewee could convince an interviewer that they are driven and motivated, but in reality this quality isn’t measurable using an interview. Instead, a valid and reliable personality questionnaire is required, and will result in the best quality of hire.
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When hiring, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the long list of desirable qualities in candidates. However, research has answered this question and consistently shows that the five traits covered in this article—cognitive ability, conscientiousness, resilience, emotional intelligence, and industriousness—are among the most important predictors of job performance.
While different roles may require additional specialised skills or personality traits, focusing on these core qualities will give hiring teams the best chance of selecting high-performing, adaptable, and reliable employees.