- The CEO of the cookie dough empire Sweet Loren’s gives a personality test to all prospective hires. Loren Castle says she’s looking for positive, passionate people with the energy to work at the sweets startup set to rake in $120 million this year. Corporate stiffs who can’t keep up with the craziness won’t make the cut.
Myers-Briggs has found that many entrepreneurs have extroverted, intuitive traits—ENFPs like Quentin Tarantino, and ENTPs like Thomas Edison. When it comes to astrology, the biggest U.S. CEOs are most likely to have the Taurus sign, like Mark Zuckerberg.
Certain qualities can be linked to success, so one chief executive is using a personality test to find her star workers and weed out the bad candidates. Loren Castle, CEO of refrigerated cookie dough empire Sweet Loren’s, runs her business with the energy of a startup—and needs her workers to thrive off that craziness. Castle hands out the CliftonStrengths assessment to every candidate she interviews to sort out the bad eggs.
One red flag that she’s always looking for? Corporate stiffs: “People that have too much corporate training and no experience with startups or fast-growing smaller brands,” Castle explains to Fortune.
“I just don’t know if they’re actually going to like this world. It’s totally different.”
The millennial CEO says she looks to snag talent who have both corporate and startup experience so they’re prepared for the intensity of running a fast-paced small business—which rolled in $97 million in gross sales last year, and has a projected $120 million run rate this year. Sweet Loren’s has expanded to 35,000 retail locations, taking over the refrigerated aisles of Target, Whole Foods, Publix, Kroger, and Walmart.
The green flags she looks for in talent, after previous hiring woes
Castle says she hasn’t always had a solid team behind her. In the beginning it was difficult for her to fully understand what the culture at Sweet Loren’s would look like, and who would be the best people to work there. But now she has a keen eye to spot those applicant green and red flags.
“It’s hard to hire the right team. That’s the hardest part of this: to really understand what your culture is and attract the best people,” Castle says. “Not everyone wants to work this hard. It’s definitely not easy—this is not a coasting job.
“We’re really mindful now when we’re building out teams,” she says, adding that when a candidate completes the test, she’s looking at: Are they analytical? Are they really strategic? Or perhaps, they’re empathetic?
Castle is looking for employees with a few core traits: They need a positive attitude, passion, and teamwork skills.
“We have less than 30 people on our team, and we run a profitable business,” she continues. “So we really need smart, passionate people on the team—you can’t kind of hide. It took us a while to get there.”
There’s another winning characteristic Castle looks for in her next Sweet Loren’s hire that can’t be parsed out through a personality test: They have to have relevant experience, even if they aren’t in the consumer packaged goods (CPG) space. One of the several things she won’t tolerate? Job-seekers with big egos.
“Rounding out each team, we’re going in eyes wide open,” Castle says. “They shouldn’t have an ego. We want everyone to be driven for their own personal fulfillment.”
The personality test given out to every applicant
Personality and talent assessments like Hogan Assessments and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator have long been an employer strategy in culling a talent pool. Here’s a peek inside the test job-seekers have to pass to work at Sweet Loren’s.
The CliftonStrengths assessment is a 30-minute test made by American analytics company Gallup that analyzes unique skills, thinking patterns, feelings, and behaviors. Questions are framed on a sliding scale: It asks job-seekers to rate their relatability to two statements, each on opposing ends of the query.
For example, the statement “I want everyone to like me” is on one end, while another saying “I want people to adore me” is on the other. Test-takers choose if one declaration “strongly describes” them, or float to a “neutral” option in the middle if neither statement resonates.
The test then categorizes the results into 34 themes across four domains: strategic thinking, relationship building, influencing, and executing. Test-takers can be described as talented in certain ways—maybe they’re a “learner” when it comes to strategic thinking, or are a stellar “developer” in relationship building.
