Whether it's finance, marketing, or recruiting most strategies and new programs fail to reach their intended results – estimates are as high as 90%. This figure is even higher for those targeting outcomes as complex as hiring, assessment, and building culture and performance.
Psychometric Assessments require eight "Yes" answers to these questions
Uncertainty or confusion around what to look for when selecting an assessment provider for hiring, development, or promotion can derail performance and your culture. From our four decades working with organizations across industries, we have developed a suite of assessments that predict performance and results – helping your teams hire to consistent standards and strengthen your culture. Delivering sound and full answers to each of the questions that follow are core to how we support the success of the organizations we serve.
1. Are your assessments validated? What is your approach for validation?
Our assessments are validated for the competencies that drive performance. Competencies are the clusters of knowledge, skill, ability, personality and values, and other characteristics that drive results. Ultimately, the assessments you use should be shown to demonstrate results in roles similar to your own and with the competencies that define success.
Some of the most critical skills and competencies, both from our own work and the workforce at large, include -
- Critical Thinking
- Collaboration
- Leadership
- Adaptability
- Creativity and Curiosity
- Customer Service
When an assessment is valid for its specific purpose (this could be hiring, development, or promotion) it’s scientifically proven to predict and relate to competencies that it’s designed to measure. Our assessments are statistically linked to job performance and organizational key performance indicators (KPIs), like turnover. We embrace any opportunity to gather performance data to determine how the assessments are driving key results. What would this performance data look like?
Here are some meaningful sources of data for validating an assessment:
- Tenure, or time employed: are assessments linked to longer tenure?
- Supervisor ratings of performance: ideally from a well-designed performance review built around your competencies. In addition, we frequently build these surveys to deploy to supervisors, asking core questions about behavior and results that should be influenced by assessment performance.
- Leading indicators: behaviors and records that show us moving in the right directions towards the lagging indicators that matter. This could include time and attendance data, time in training, or records of other core behaviors that drive results.
- Lagging indicators: sales, retention/turnover rates, total controllable income, and other savings.
We value and actively seek the opportunity to collect data and validate on an ongoing basis. This not only allows us to show on the assessments are working for key processes like hiring or development, but it also allows us to set custom benchmarks for performance on the different tests and scales– helping organizations hire individuals who will perform, live their culture, and stay.
2. How will the assessment be built? How will it be customized to our specific needs for performance and culture?
We begin by consulting with your team to understand the performance dimensions critical for success and living your culture (e.g., culture-fit). Then, we customize our assessments to include tests that measure the potential to perform, stay, and live your values. We also can tailor the assessments to speak to your brand. For example, we can tailor situational test items to reference your specific organization and details about your operations. In this way we're keeping the skeleton of your validated assessment while enhancing the candidate experience even further: connecting it to your brand, language, and values. Tests, and even a realistic job preview, can be resurfaced to be more relevant to your culture and the situations that one might encounter on the job.
Additionally, our assessment results can be customized with competencies and performance-based narratives that speak your language, helping to secure buy-in and support for the solution, while ensuring that you are hiring to meaningful and consistent standards.
Our assessments are built from tests that fall into three main categories: – Personality and Culture-building, Ability, and Situational. Personality and Culture-building assessments screen for qualities critical to performance and cultural fit.
- Ability assessments measure potential to problem-solve, learn and process new information quickly, and mental horsepower. From our research and mastery of the field of Industrial-Organizational (I-O) Psychology, we know that problem-solving is one of the strongest predictors of job performance, and one of the most frequently sought competencies across industries.
- Situational assessments present candidates with job-relevant situations based on critical incidents, and assess the potential to perform in critical situations on the job.
- Personality and Culture-Building. With over one hundred years of science and evolution in the assessment and understanding of personality and values we can capture the personality traits and qualities that will strengthen your culture and performance.
What’s more, we can mix and match different assessments to create unique assessment bundles for specific positions or job groups. An assessment bundle might include a test of cognitive ability, a situational assessment, and a measure of personality. Having a variety of assessment types in one bundle dramatically improves the candidate experience (we’ll explain why this is important next), while predicting the likelihood of job success.
3. Is the candidate experience engaging? What is your candidate completion rate?
Validated assessments with job-related content make candidates believe they were evaluated fairly, and educates them about your organization, culture, and expectations. This is usually the person’s first, or most in-depth, experience of your company. Because assessments use a variety of questions, and are an appropriate length to the role, candidates are likely to form positive impressions of your organization. We live in a connected world. Your candidates are part of your industry, are often your customers, and you want them to leave with a positive impression of your enterprise.
Because of our careful approach to test construction, our completion rates range from 90-95%. Extremely long assessments frustrate candidates, while those that are too short for what they attempt to measure not only affects their validity, but candidate satisfaction, as candidates may feel that they didn’t have a sufficient opportunity to perform and demonstrate who they are. To further enhance the candidate experience, we let candidates know approximately how long the assessment will take to complete – and illustrate their progress with a tracking bar that follows the candidate through the assessment, shown below.
4. Is the candidate experience mobile responsive?
While we’re on the topic of candidate experience, all of our assessments are mobile responsive and optimized. We know that more than 50% of candidates, especially those applying for entry-level positions, begin the process on a mobile device. Candidates can complete the entire assessment on a mobile device, tablet, or computer. They can also start on one device and finish on another with the link they've received. And, because our assessments are mobile responsive, the content (i.e., questions and response options) will automatically adjust to fit the size of the screen that the candidate is using, resulting in a candidate-friendly interface.
5. Are assessment reports tailored to the needs of our recruiters and hiring managers?
Unlike many assessments on the market, there is no extensive training or certification required to understand our assessment results. Our results are designed with our users in mind – operators, recruiters, and managers – to provide all of the information you need, when you need it. You're immediately provided with an overall recommendation for the candidate, as well as how the candidate performed on the different competencies measured by the assessment. Additionally, users are able to view information for each competency that describes the candidate’s expected behavior and potential to perform, if hired. The information in the assessment result is designed to streamline and inform your decision making process by providing that overall recommendation and competency-based strengths and opportunities. Beyond hiring, the assessment result provides the user with information on how to support the candidate’s success if they are hired. Our assessment results are web-based and scored immediately after a candidate submits their assessment. Results can easily be printed out or shared with others electronically.
6. Are your assessments compliant with Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Guidelines? What is your approach to avoiding adverse impact? Legal defensibility?
Our assessments have never been called into legal question in our four decades of contribution.
Corvirtus assessments are ADA-compliant, and our interface is designed to counter color-blindness and individuals with visual impairments.
None of our assessments are time-sensitive, meaning that candidates may complete them at their own pace. Furthermore, our assessments auto-scroll between questions, and are built to engage a neurodiverse workforce.
Combined, these features, and our intense validation, support legal defensibility and create an experience that candidates view as engaging, fair, and something that enhanced their ability to perform. This is supported by our high completion rates. Our assessments also comply with the standards set forth by the Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures. Candidate are asked, voluntarily, to share protected class information, separate from the assessment, so we can ensure the tests and overall assessment do not contribute to adverse impact. While this information is entirely optional for candidates to provide, collecting it allows us to monitor our assessments ensuring candidates of protected groups are not failing our assessments at a disproportionately higher rate than others. In short: we have you covered.
7. Do you partner with us to document return-on-investment?
All of our assessments are validated, but what about demonstrating results for your unique enterprise in dollars? As part of our partnership with you, we measure the return-on-investment (ROI) of our assessments by linking assessment results to your own key performance indicators, like turnover, customer/stakeholder satisfaction and outcomes, and performance measures valuable to your culture. We relish the opportunity to show our clients the impact our assessments have when it comes to hiring and retaining top performers, and on their bottom line.
To this point, one of our clients with locations across the country found that employees who failed the assessment but were hired were twice as likely to be terminated.
After just one year of implementation, Corvirtus assessments have helped companies achieve the following:
8. Will we have dedicated members of your team to provide support?
Ticket systems are not our thing. We believe in forming positive relationships with each one of our clients – each one has a dedicated person they can reach at all times, as well as access to I-O Psychologists and practitioners. You will never need to worry about waiting long periods of time for a response or have a concern addressed. Our team is committed to exceeding your expectations and addressing problems or questions immediately via phone or email. We extend this not only to you, but any employee or candidate that needs our support.
Are you ready to better understand candidate behavior, characteristics, and traits and reduce your time to hire? With our tailored predictive skills testing and hiring assessments you can achieve great things.
Refreshed August 2024. Originally published March 2020.
