Welcome back to The Recruiter Tool Kit Series, where we review the latest and greatest digital tools that will make any recruiter’s life easier. Learn more about the benefits and features of these tools and then store them in your own “toolbox” to build an amazing resource of help.
In this blog, we explore and test the features of CrystalKnows, an online personality app that provides personality assessments, predictions, and coaching tools. You can get the free browser extension from the Chrome store here.
As a recruiter looking for job candidates, it’s helpful to know a person’s communication style, motivations, and behavioral tendencies before you reach out to them. This can help improve your overall outreach strategy and sharpen your communication and management skills. With the help of CrystalKnows, you can learn about anyone based on their unique personality.
“By analyzing public data and text, Crystal can generate personality reports for your contacts and anyone in our database. Learn how to adapt your communication style to different personalities, and take the guesswork out of cold calling, networking, and meetings with new clients or customers.”
With this app, you can look up personalities on LinkedIn, get real-time suggestions when you’re writing emails in Gmail, and conduct personality research within Salesforce.
How It Works:
Once you download the browser extension, you can sign up for a free account, and then build your personality profile by answering a few questions. This assessment will tell you more about yourself and give you info that you can share with managers and colleagues.
You can find out:
- What comes naturally to you
- What energizes you
- What drains you
- What people should think about when they speak with you
- What people should think about when they meet with you
It also offers a “Conversation Coach” where you can decide what someone would want to do, like meet with you or email you or call you.
Then choose for what reason, like to brainstorm ideas, give feedback, or resolve a conflict.
Then you can view the advice, by seeing what should be said and do’s and don’ts.
Using CrystalKnows on LinkedIn
Right now, you can only use Crystal on LinkedIn profiles, but you can gain a lot of info from this one platform. Based on a person’s profile or a text sample they wrote, Crystal can predict their personality. Just go to their LinkedIn page and click on View Personality.
Then to the right, a sidebar will pop up with loads of information about the person based on the app’s predictions. There is a little menu to navigate around everything.
First, you will see an overview of the person and their personality type, likes, and avoids. As you scroll down, you can access the Conversation Coach to get advice on how to speak and communicate with the person. You can also view their personality graph to see where they land on the color wheel.
Next, you can view how you relate to them and understand your chemistry based on the app’s predictions of the person and your personality profile.
Keep scrolling to learn more about their personality where you get an overview, learn about their communication style, what motivates them, and how they work.
Crystal gives advice on how to communicate with a certain personality type.
If you click on the Conversation Coach tab in the menu, you can pick different situations and get advice.
When you click the Scenarios tab, it gives you advice on what to avoid, what to do in a meeting, how to work together, and more.
Then the email tab gives suggestions for a variety of email elements from the subject line to the greeting to the body text.
The app even offers email templates that you can copy and paste to use.
If you click the View Full Profile at the top, it takes you to the CrystalKnows website where you can get more information and advice. Crystal also stores everyone you research so you can keep a list of them for reference, located under the People tab.
Using Crystal in Gmail
Once you have added people to your Crystal app, if you’re using Gmail, you can use Crystal to help write emails to your job candidates with suggestions based on their personalities.
As you type, Crystal will underline in blue the words or phrases that need your attention and a red dot with a number of insights will appear in the bottom right of the email. You’ll also see their profile pop up on the right sidebar, explaining the insights and suggestions the app offers. Then, you can edit and adjust your email accordingly so you have the most effective message sent to them.
You can also use this same email feature if you use LinkedIn Recruiter when you type messages in LinkedIn’s InMail so you can get more responses.
CrystalKnows has only two plans, free and paid. The paid plan includes many more features for just $29 per user per month. Learn more here.
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