When profiling your job role, simple is best.

What you will learn from this post: What are the four main behavioural quadrants and why is that information valuable to you in recruiting your team.

The first information about the four main behavioural (or personality) quadrants was documented almost 2,500 years ago by Hippocrates.  Since then there have been plenty of organisations and individuals that have created profiling tools of varying accuracy, and ways of explaining the idea behind behavioural quadrants. 

I’m going to talk about it my way, because that’s what makes sense to me.  I’ll also give a couple of examples that I’ve found helpful from books I’ve read and conversations I’ve had.

What are the four quadrants?  Here is a very basic description of each:

• Controller / Assertive : This person cares more about getting things done and leading people.  They will be persuasive and assertive.  They enjoy leadership roles and often don’t care too much about other peoples feelings.  They can make great leaders and entrepreneurs. 
• Analyser/Logical : This person cares more about facts, figures, and detail.  They will be very organised, and often take a long time to make decisions, because they wont’ decide until they’ve looked at and compared all the detail involved.  They prefer structure and systems.  They can make great engineers and scientists.
• Supporter/Empathy : This person is all about relationships.  They enjoy being in support roles and feel that the worst thing you can ever do is upset someone else.  They make great nurses, carers and customer service people.
• Expressive/Social : This person seems to be all about attention.  They usually have the ‘Gift of the Gab’ and find it easy to get people to like them socially and professionally.  They’ll generally be outgoing and gregarious to some degree.  They can make good relationship style sales people.

I’ve looked at and taken lots of different tests over the years that are designed to identify which is your most dominant quadrant.  We all have a bit of each quadrant in us and everyone will have one (and sometimes two) dominant quadrants.  For the record, there are people that will tell you (when you take some personality tests) that your quadrant never changes.  They’ll say things like ‘You were born with your personality and that’s who you are and always will be.’  They are incorrect.  One of the things we do at Advanced Business Abilities is direct, personal, one-on-one coaching that helps you to change behaviours, and that can lead to a change in your dominant quadrant.  

Recommended Reading

I read an interesting book on the the subject 10 years ago that has helped me to think about these quadrants a bit more clearly than I had before.  It was called “What Makes People Tick” by a guy called Des Hunt.  In it he uses a bird analogy that worked for me in thinking about the quadrants.  Here’s his website: www.tick.com.au

Controller / Assertive people are Eagles

Analyser / Logical People are Owls

Supporter / Empathy people are Doves

Expressive / Social People are Peacocks

This helped me keep it simple when I was thinking about it.  And I’ve thought about it a lot.  It’s really valuable in recruiting because different jobs require different skill sets.  Generally speaking, a person will be better at things that are innately easier for them to do.  If you are looking for a supervisor and you know it requires someone who will be able to do ‘tough love’, then you won’t want to hire an expressive social person.  They most often find it difficult to do ‘tough love’ on anyone.

To start creating a profile for your next job opening by making four lists:

1. Essentials: What are the things that are non-negotiable.  If they don’t tick every box on this list they are a ‘no’.
2. Nice to Have (and I might be able to live without if everything else is ok): These things would be nice to have, and they are not essential.
3. Absolutely No: If someone ticks even one of these boxes, they are a ‘no’.
4. Doesn’t Matter: These are things that don’t matter

On your lists you can include anything and everything you think is important.  Examples are qualifications, particular experience, skills, behaviours, attitudes, competencies, willingness’s – anything that you deem to be important for the role. 

Make sure you write it down!  There is a lot of information here, and it’s too easy to forget something when you are evaluating 10 or 20 or even 50 people in a  week. 

This list is for your internal purposes only, so don’t hold back.  It is your decision who you hire. 

Get clear on this information in your own head now, before you actually write the advert.  You’ll be amazed by the impact this has on your ability to write an ad that will actually attract the person you are looking for.  

The other thing to note is that personality / behavioural quadrant are not the most important things when recruiting someone – attitude and general competency are.  You can find more info about that in other posts on my blog.  See this one and this one to get you started.

That’s all for now.  Leave a comment below if you are thinking differently about the role you are recruiting for.

Mike Irving