With hiring, your goal is to accurately select people who will perform, fit your culture, and stay for the optimal amount of time.
Assessments greatly improve your ability to do this and improve the efficiency and accuracy of your hiring process by equipping hiring managers with job-relevant information about candidates, such as their aptitude, ability, and personal attributes as related to the job.
What to Expect
After reading through this guide, you will be a master of knowledge on the following:
- The science behind assessments and why they are an effective means of selecting candidates.
- How assessments can be leveraged for employee development.
- What it means when we say that an assessment is “valid.”
- How cut scores are set to determine whether a candidate is good enough to move forward in the hiring process.
- The ability of assessments to keep companies out of legal trouble with regard to hiring decisions.
Download the Whitepaper - Hiring Assessments: A Brief Guide
Preview: The Importance of Assessments for Successful Hiring
The primary purpose of an assessment is to provide objective information to identify quality hires; that is, employees who will perform, fit your culture, and stay. Unfortunately, most hiring managers are typically no better than the flip of a coin when it comes to judging whether a candidate will be a quality hire. This makes assessments invaluable. By providing rich information, based on data, about how a candidate will perform on the job, assessments allow you to confidently narrow your focus to only those candidates who are most likely to succeed if hired. While using your own perceptions and ‘gut’ instinct is valuable, it is more efficient and accurate to save that for after the assessment results to support your final decision.
Assessments are also essential to employee development. In working with a new hire, you may have noticed only after working with the person for several weeks or months that his/her values and mindsets contributed to difficulty on the job. Hiring assessments can help you guide a new employee’s growth in the critical first few months on the job, thereby reducing not only your frustration but the often expected reduced productivity and below-standard execution with a new hire. In addition, information from the assessment can reduce the “churn,” or early turnover often experienced among new hires.
Further, assessments designed specifically for development allow you to understand and identify the needs and opportunities of your new high potential employees and build a talent pipeline. These assessments can be given to employees at any time to identify gaps in performance where improvements can be made, as well as gaps between employees’ mindsets and skills and what is required by your culture and the job. Leveraging information obtained from development assessments allows you to target growth and development opportunities to fill in those gaps and plan for the future of your organization.
