Why CAVA is using personality assessments for talent development

So you’re an ENTJ. Or perhaps a High D, or a Type 7. What does that mean for your coworkers?

All of these classifications come from different types of personality tests, and they’re increasingly seeping into the workplace. HR teams might use personality assessments to recruit candidates, or develop current employees in their roles.

The latter use case is of interest to Kelly Costanza, chief people officer at CAVA, who told HR Brew her team started using personality assessments this year for talent development and management. She said she believes such assessments will be useful in helping colleagues understand how best to collaborate with one another, as well as provide additional insight for employees looking to grow their careers at the fast-casual food chain.

How CAVA is using personality assessments in the workplace. CAVA has been using a tool called Organizational Analysis & Design (OAD), which surveys candidates based on “three main requirements necessary for an individual to be successful in their role,” according to the company’s website: knowledge and education, work behaviors and traits, and skills and experience.

Costanza said her team first asked general managers participating in the company’s “Academy GM” program to take the assessment during a summit earlier this year. The program is made up of high-performing general managers and is intended to build a talent pipeline across the food chain’s restaurants. CAVA, which went public last year, currently employs over 10,000 workers and is growing, according to Costanza.

With the OAD assessment, Costanza’s team can get insight into these employees’ personalities, i.e. “Who is more extroverted versus introverted?,” “Who's got a high sense of urgency versus who's got a high sense of process?,” or “Who's got a high sense of delegation versus a high sense of detail?”

She stressed that she doesn’t view the survey as a test workers either pass or fail, but rather a tool that helps colleagues get to know one another better. The assessments might help them better understand why a coworker tends to talk more, for example, or prefers when their colleagues get straight to the point. Costanza said becoming more self-aware about her own personality traits has been useful in leading her team, too. She’s hyper-creative, and she tends to communicate things with a high sense of urgency—knowing this, she tries to preface any big ideas by communicating to her team that the timeline to execute them isn’t urgent.

“It’s really fun to see different departments get together and learn about each other,” she said.

CAVA is also integrating some employees’ OAD scores into their talent profiles, so that their supervisors can understand how best to support their career development at the company, Costanza said: “It’s just a really helpful tool in realizing what someone's natural makeup is, and then how we can help them develop.”

What HR leaders should consider. Regardless of how HR pros choose to use personality assessments in the workplace, they should be looking for “psychometric or statistical evidence” that the tool they’re considering works, said Nathan Mondragon, chief innovation officer at HR management platform HireVue. If they’re planning to ask job candidates to take a personality test for an open role, for example, they should make sure the test measures what it claims to be measuring, and that it’s taking factors into consideration that will be relevant to success in the position.

Employers should take bias and fairness into account when weighing these assessments, as well, Mondragon added. An analysis should show that categories including race, age, and gender are “being treated equally in the scores,” he said.

Tara Furiani, an executive coach and HR consultant, said she’s been using behavioral assessments or cognitive tools in her work since about 2005, earning certifications for both Myers-Briggs and DiSC. These days she primarily relies on The Predictive Index, and finds it particularly useful for building self-awareness among employees, as well as enhancing team dynamics.

Furiani cautioned that these tools can become problematic if they seek to assess “culture fit,” and appear to favor one type of person, or evaluate cognitive skills in a way that systemically disfavors job candidates who learn differently. She typically advises HR pros to “check and validate that you’re not disproportionately excluding a number of people with whatever inherent and built-in bias these systems have.”

Furiani’s best piece of advice for HR teams considering personality assessments is to ask themselves why they’re doing it, and what they’re going to do with the information gathered. Leaders should take the time to understand these tools before they implement them, and make sure they have a “strategy related to hiring, related to people development, related to internal team communication,” for example, “where this would be an added tool.”