How to Find & Hire the Right Hotel Staff: Heather Myers, Traitify

The Proven Principles Hospitality Podcast

If you’ve ever wanted to know more about those personality tests that recruiters often have you go through, this episode is for you.

Heather is a Stanford trained personality psychologist and Chief Psychology Officer at Traitify, a company working to improve the assessment interview in the recruiting process.

Traitify bills itself as the world’s fastest talent assessment, using images to determine an array of personality traits as opposed to long form questions you may be used to seeing.

With hotels starting to hire again, but so many people having moved on to other jobs (and even other industries), I wanted to get insight on the state of recruiting and how it’s changing based on the effects of the pandemic.

Personality assessments are nothing new to the hotel industry but as difficulties in hiring and recruiting from a smaller pool dominate the news today, organizations who evolve their thinking around the employee lifecycle will be the ones who come out on top.

On this episode we discuss:

• Assessments for all levels at all stages of the employee lifecycle, from candidate to employee (3:08)
• Picture based assessments vs. traditional text based questions (5:47)
• Are pictures more open to interpretation than text based questions? (9:12)
• The 5 traits being assessed - 5 factor model, OCEAN acronym (11:04)
• Are the results of the assessment predictive of someone’s ability to get promoted? (19:01)
• Predictive validity studies and interview profiles (21:26)
• The state of recruiting (23:20)
• Attracting new entrants to the hospitality industry (25:30)
• Should assessments be used as a hiring decision? A pass/fail? (27:36)
  

About Heather

Heather is a Stanford trained personality psychologist and statistician and the Chief Psychology Officer at Traitify. Here she manages a team that develops personality assessments using Traitify's visual technology and design. This includes designing validation studies and conducting statistical analyses. Additionally, Heather has 15 years of experience in consulting in the areas of survey design, experimental design, and data analysis. She is a member of the APA (American Psychological Association) and SIOP (Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychologists).

Links

Website: https://www.traitify.com/

LinkedIn (Traitify): https://www.linkedin.com/company/traitify/

LinkedIn (Heather): https://www.linkedin.com/in/heather-myers-phd/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/traitify

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Do you need to revamp your hospitality business strategy? Do you need help with a project or someone to work with on a tough problem in your hotel or restaurant? If I can help you in any way, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

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