The Complete Guide to Assessments

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Well-implemented assessments can be among the most powerful tools available to human resources professionals, and using “modern psychometric tools that accurately measure total human potential have been proven to

enhance overall productivity, reduce employee attrition, and reduce overall hiring costs”

(The cult of personality testing: why assessments are essential for employee selection, Bouton and Moore).

What are you measuring?

One way to think about assessments is that they answer questions about an individual’s skills and abilities and allow us to predict their potential as an employee (Personality Tests in Employment Selection: Use With Caution, Baez) and even their promotion or executive-level potential (Pre-hiring assessment improves the executive talent pipeline, Brousseau, Johnson and Landis).

In the search to find the best-fit individual for a particular position and organization, companies are realizing that the hiring market is becoming clouded with people listing skills on their resume that they don’t possess (What’s Wrong With Using Resumes For Hiring? Pretty Much Everything, Sullivan).

Assessments help answer questions by providing a standardized method of decision-making and a resource that companies can refer back to.

“Using a series of questions, post-hire assessments offer an objective way for organizations to determine the critical

competency levels for talent, addressing who’s ready to move up or across in an

organization”

(Assessing for Succession Development, Kalman).

Virtually every company will interview at least one job candidate before making an offer of employment rather than simply relying on their view of the résumés submitted.

With no rating scale or commonality among questions, the interviewer is left to subjectively determine if the candidate performed well, without fully measuring him or her against the competition (What’s Wrong With Interviews? The Top 50 Most Common Interview Problems, Sullivan).

“Hiring departments are tasked with finding great talent while running on a streamlined ship, and data shows pre-hire assessments can help decisions makers choose candidates wisely”

(Expanding the Use of Assessments, Lombardi).

Common types of assessments

Can Do

Cognitive Ability

Skills

Will Do

Interpersonal Capabilities

Personality Traits

Will FitValues

Interests

Developmental assessments commonly identify personality or leadership potential, while hiring assessments measure knowledge, skills and competencies that a candidate already possesses.

While assessments can be invaluable tools to any HR professional’s arsenal,

they can spell bad news when used incorrectly.

“The key is for employers to use valid, reliable, and legally sustainable tests in

hiring employees”

(Personality Tests in Employment Selection: Use With Caution, Baez).

By being standardized, assessments afford companies a uniform way to determine the best-fit candidate for a position. Intended or not, people have innate biases which may lead them to hire people with a similar culture (Hiring as Cultural Matching: The Case of Elite Professional Service Firms, Rivera).

“Adverse impact occurs when a decision, practice, or policy has a disproportionately

negative effect on a protected group” (Unlawful Workplace Harassment [The Issue if Respect],

NCDHHS).

It is critical that an organization have an up to date job analysis that accurately

describes the skills and abilities required for success in the position and supports the defensibility of the selection process.

Psychometric assessments are among the best investments that an

organization can make-both when deciding whom to bring on board as well as how to develop them once they join

the organization.

To improve hiring outcomes, “assessments afford recruiters an additional level of confidence that their placements will thrive in their new positions” (Assessing Competency During the Hiring Process, Walker).

HR professionals have a strategic opportunity to benefit from increasing their knowledge about assessments and learning how they might be used to help an organization build a better workforce.

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