When Compassion Meets Expertise: Why Personality Profiling Matters for Hiring in Healthcare

Dar Peleg, Ph.D.
General
November 18, 2024

Imagine walking into a therapy clinic, burdened with the weight of chronic pain or an unspoken anxiety that has built up over months. You hope to find solace in the expertise and gentle guidance of a professional. Your therapist, however, is competent but rigid, unable to adjust their approach to your unique needs. Their responses seem distant, mechanical, lacking the empathy that you need to feel truly understood. Over time, you find yourself disengaging from therapy, feeling unheard and misunderstood.

Now, imagine a different scenario. You walk in and are met by a therapist whose warmth radiates from the start. They adapt their approach to match your emotions that day, listening with empathy, adjusting their techniques and treatments as your journey evolves. Here, therapy becomes more than a clinical requirement—it becomes a true path to healing.

This contrast illustrates a common challenge within healthcare professions such as occupational therapy, speech therapy, nursing, and medicine. The most effective practitioners go beyond their professional and cognitive expertise to cultivate profound personal qualities: empathy, patience, adaptability, restraint, and active listening. But high demand and staffing shortages often lead to compromises during hiring, potentially affecting patient care.

The Risk of Compromising on Personality Skills

Healthcare organizations face the difficult task of recruiting skilled practitioners amidst increasing demand. In these high-pressure environments, emphasis may sometimes lean too heavily on candidates' technical qualifications while downplaying critical personality traits. The results can be detrimental:

  • Patient Dissatisfaction: When practitioners lack empathy, patients often feel unheard, misunderstood, and less motivated to follow treatment plans.
  • Therapeutic Barriers: Without adaptability, practitioners struggle to tailor treatments to diverse patient needs, potentially stalling progress.
  • Workplace Stress: Healthcare environments thrive on teamwork and collaboration. Practitioners with low patience or high rigidity can increase workplace tension and reduce morale.
  • Higher Turnover: If personality mismatches lead to a lack of fulfillment or ongoing friction, practitioners are more likely to leave their positions, resulting in costly turnover and inconsistent patient care.-

The impact of these issues cannot be overstated; patient care and well-being depend on the synergy between professional expertise and soft skills.

Enter Remote Psychological Profiling

In an age where precision is increasingly demanded in every field, remote psychological profiling offers a transformative solution for healthcare hiring. This advanced method of evaluating candidates allows organizations to assess both the hard and soft skills of potential hires without needing to bring them onsite for extensive, time-consuming interviews and tests.

How does it work?

Remote profiling involves analyzing a candidate’s digital footprint, including public social media behavior, verbal cues, and more, using established psychological models like the Big Five personality traits. With proper consent from candidates, this method allows healthcare employers to obtain a nuanced, in-depth understanding of their personality traits, cognitive abilities, and social tendencies.

The Benefits at a Glance:

  1. Objectivity: By relying on publicly available data and advanced psychological frameworks, biases inherent to traditional interviews or testing are minimized.
  2. Efficiency: Employers can quickly screen and assess multiple candidates, significantly reducing the time and resources spent on lengthy evaluations.
  3. Depth: Remote profiling goes beyond what can be revealed in a few hours of interviews. By examining years of behavior, it presents a well-rounded perspective of a candidate’s empathy, adaptability, patience, and other key traits.
  4. Minimal Intrusiveness: Candidates do not need to go through additional interviews or tests, reducing potential stress and friction in the hiring process.

The Right Fit for a Life-Changing Role

For healthcare organizations, hiring practitioners who balance professional acumen with soft skills isn’t just a luxury; it’s essential. Remote profiling helps ensure that patients will be met by healthcare providers who truly listen, adapt, and care, improving outcomes, engagement, and overall satisfaction.

Consider that patient you once imagined, walking into a therapy session. The right hire—the one with empathy and adaptability—turns hope into healing and builds connections that last far beyond the clinic walls. Remote personality profiling empowers healthcare employers to ensure more stories like that are written every day.

In a world where compassion meets technology, everyone wins.

About the author

Dr. Dar Peleg is the CEO of 99% Remote Personality Analysis.
He is a certified Profiler with 15 years of experience both in the homeland security and private sectors. An expert witness in behavioral and personality profiles as well as credibility assessment. An international instructor in social and investigative psychology. PhD in Psychology. MA LAW.