CVM People adds Hogan Psychometric as a new service line to support clients to make more informed hiring decisions and better assess the dynamic of pre-existing teams.

We’ve always worked as an extension of our clients’ leadership teams – not only  sending CVs, but advising them on what “good” looks like for their roles, culture, and operating environment. Now, CVM People is adding another capability to that advisory toolkit: Hogan psychometrics.

After some of the team have completed accreditations in Hogan interpretation, we can now bring structured, evidence-based behavioural insight to support hiring decisions. This is not “personality testing for the sake of it.” It’s a practical way to reduce risk, improve fit, and help new hires succeed faster, while staying firmly grounded in role context and human judgement.

 

Why Hogan, and why now?

In many organisations, the hiring bar for technical capability is clear: experience, track record, domain knowledge, delivery evidence. But as roles become more senior and more cross-functional, failure is often driven less by skill and more by behavioural misalignment – how someone leads, communicates, handles pressure, and fits the environment around them.

By adding Hogan, we strengthen our ability to support clients with:

• More consistent, evidenced based insight on personality traits and potential derailers alongside interviews and experience assessments

• Earlier identification of misalignment risks to an existing team and culture

• Better confidence when making high-stakes hires around core competencies 

• A clearer plan for how a hire could be supported once they join to succeed and develop further in role

What Hogan actually measures (and why it’s useful in hiring)

Hogan is designed specifically for workplace settings, it links behavioural traits to work performance and leadership outcomes, rather than offering generic personality profiling.

We’ll typically use three core assessments:

1) HPI (Hogan Personality Inventory): “Bright side”

How someone tends to show up day-to-day when they’re at their best: strengths, preferences, and work style.

2) HDS (Hogan Development Survey): “Dark side” / derailers

How behaviour can shift under stress, fatigue, or pressure: the watch-outs that can derail performance when “the guard is down.”

3) MVPI (Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory): drivers and values

What someone is motivated by long-term, what energises them, and what environments they’re likely to thrive in.

The point is not to “label” candidates. The value is in building a fuller, more predictive picture of how someone is likely to operate in the  role, within the organisational context, and with the team.

 

The client benefit: what changes in your hiring process

1) Evidence-based hiring decisions, not just “good interviews”

Even strong interviewers can be swayed by confidence, familiarity, or “gut feel.” Hogan adds an additional lens: structured behavioural insight that supports more consistent comparisons between candidates.

Our approach remains holistic, psychometrics does not replace interviews. Rather, they sharpen them, and help you make decisions with clearer rationale.

2) Reduced risk of expensive mis-hires

Senior hires are costly – in salary, opportunity cost, disruption, and knock-on retention issues. We see Hogan as an additional layer of support that can help reduce the chance of a mismatch becoming an “expensive mistake.”

Importantly, it’s not just about whether someone can do the job. It’s about whether they can do it successfully in your environment, and whether your environment will set them up to succeed.

3) Better retention and faster “ramp up”

Because Hogan can highlight strengths and development areas before the appointment, clients can go into the hire with:

• clearer expectations of leadership and communication style

• a more realistic view of pressure behaviours

• an early support plan (coaching, onboarding focus, stakeholder management guardrails)

That can mean fewer surprises in the first months, and a quicker path to impact.

4) Stronger team dynamics – not just “one great candidate”

A leadership mismatch can demotivate teams, trigger attrition, and quickly make an environment feel “toxic.” We see real value in using psychometrics to understand what a team needs to compliment the existing dynamic, not just who looks best on paper from an experience perspective.

This is where Hogan becomes especially powerful for organisations hiring into new roles or evolving operating models:

• What’s missing in the current team mix?

• What leadership style will complement the existing culture?

• What kind of stakeholder approach is required for the business context?

We can now support clients who want to go further by helping them assess current team patterns too, building a clearer picture of what will genuinely strengthen the function. 

 

How we will use Hogan in practice

At CVM People, we already invest heavily in candidate understanding: detailed interviews, role-relevant evidence, and written insights that cover both technical capability and behavioural indicators. Hogan adds a further layer that helps validate (or challenge) those observations with objective data.

In practice, clients can expect Hogan to be used to:

• Inform deeper, more targeted second-stage interviews (“Let’s explore how you handle conflict / pressure / ambiguity in real scenarios…”)

• Pressure-test fit for the role and the environment (e.g., scale-up pace vs regulated governance; high autonomy vs high stakeholder complexity)

• Create a practical onboarding and support plan based on known watch-outs and motivators

• Support internal alignment between hiring manager, HR, and leadership team by grounding discussion in structured insight rather than opinion

 

The ethical guardrails: clarity, not labels

We’re explicit about how psychometrics should (and shouldn’t) be used.

• Not a verdict. We use Hogan as a conversation tool – insight that opens up better questions, not a pass/fail outcome.

• No boxing people in. Scores are not “good” or “bad.” Context matters: different roles, sectors, and cultures need different strengths.

• Never in isolation. Hogan should be used alongside interviews, experience evidence, and role requirements, not instead of them.

• Proper interpretation matters. Even seemingly straightforward terms (e.g., sociability, ambition, learning approach) can be misunderstood without accredited interpretation, which is exactly why we’re now trained and certified to use it responsibly.

Done well, Hogan reduces bias by challenging assumptions and giving clients another source of structured information.

 

What this means for clients hiring into new roles

If you’re hiring into a newly created senior role, or evolving a function (data, CX, martech, product, engineering, transformation) – the biggest risk is often that the role is new but expectations aren’t fully aligned. Hogan helps make the implicit visible:

• What behaviours will succeed here?

• What leadership style will unlock the team (not unsettle it)?

• What motivators will keep this person engaged long-term?

• What pressure responses might show up at the exact moment the role gets hard?

Our aim is simple: better hires that last, perform, and elevate the team around them, backed by structured insight that we will support our clients interpret.