Do Recruiters Select Workers with Different Personality Traits for Different Tasks? A Discrete Choice Experiment

Abstract

Do recruiters select workers with different personality traits for different tasks? A discrete choice experiment*This paper explores whether firms recruit workers with different personality traits for different tasks. For our analysis, we used data from a discrete choice experiment conducted among recruiters of 634 firms in Germany. Recruiters were asked to choose between job applicants who differed in seven aspects: professional competence, the 'big five' personality traits and the prospective wage level. We found that all personality traits affect the hiring probability of the job applicant; among them, conscientiousness and agreeableness have the strongest effects. However, recruiters' preferences differed for different job tasks. For analytical tasks, recruiters prefer more open and conscientious applicants, whereas they favour more open, extraverted, and agreeable workers for interactive tasks.

Working for Nothing: Personality and Time Allocation in the UK

“…Conversely, scoring highly on openness to experience and being more neurotic leads to more unpaid overtime for men. These results suggest that some compensation between personality traits may be occurring which is genderspecific as suggested by Risse et al (2018) or perhaps some sorting into tasks (which we are unable to control for with our data) as suggested by Wehner et al (2020). For both women and men being neurotic and more conscientious leads to more unpaid overtime which combined with the health effects associated with neuroticism cause concern as there are clearly some personality combinations that can lead to being exploited in the labour market.…”