Personality and behavior assessments help organizations streamline screening and selection processes using validated and predictive data. This can give insight into not only what makes individuals successful in the organization and in their roles, but also into how people fit together, communicate, complement each other, and contradict each other. Highly effective assessments afford near-seamless options for HR to get a deeper look at candidates, driving better decisions and reducing turnover.
But, with dozens of assessment options on the market, choosing one can be difficult. HR and recruitment professionals are left with the task of narrowing options with the need to show immediate results and return on value to finance. Doing so can be difficult. It can also be a mistake.
Good assessments are made up of multiple assessment tools, typically using frameworks built on multiple assessment types and combining personality, behavioral, competency, and other assessments. In many cases, the same assessments are not valuable across every role or for every individual. So, HR professionals are recommended to create selection criteria and use that to choose a range of tools that will create a better picture of the individual.
Set Goals for Recruitment
Recruitment goals should align with long-term business goals, short-term business changes, and meeting team and culture needs. Chances are, these goals are already defined inside your organization and you can simply adopt them.
Most recruitment professionals also have secondary goals such as:
- Creating a better recruitment experience for candidates
- Reducing the cost versus quality of hiring
- Reducing turnover
- Improving employee happiness and therefore reducing churn
- Making unbiased but quality hires
Each of these goals can help you target which assessments you might need depending on selection criteria.
Set Goals for Assessments
What should your assessment do? In most cases, a good assessment will fulfill at least the following goals:
- Deliver objective and legally defensible information into the hiring process
- Create a cost-effective and efficient interview process by integrating behavioral and personality testing to highlight desirable or undesirable traits
- Reduce the need to use hunches and impressions in the hiring process
- Increase understanding of the candidate’s skills, behavior, preferences, and personality
- Equip HR with the tools to develop employees and teams and make selections based on that goal
Most assessments fall into a few categories including:
- Technical skills test (e.g., Excel test)
- Cognitive ability test (OPM or Harver)
- Situational judgment test
- Communication skills test
- Job simulation test
- Competency assessment (typically soft skills rather than hard)
- Behavioral assessment (may overlap with competency)
- Personality assessment (MBTI)
You can then choose which of these are most relevant to your organization. Here, many organizations can drop technical skills tests (technical skills are easy to train, except where advancement in those skills is crucial to success), to focus on factors such as behavior that influence actual performance. For example, it’s a lot easier to teach a candidate Excel than it is to teach an affinity for numbers and pattern recognition, or a high sense of personal motivation.
Reliability and Validity
Reliability and validity are two incredibly important factors to consider when choosing HR assessments. Here, most are scored based on data on how often individuals score the same on a test.
However, most assessments are scored by their manufacturers or by companies selling those services, so you may want to invest in personal research if you doubt results.
For example, the MBTI foundation publishes that test-takers receive the same results on assessments 75-90% of the time.
Validity is also incredibly crucial. Validity refers to whether an assessment can be validated or not. Most HR assessments will have validity data published online. Most organizations should also continue to collect data to validate the assessment and its results inside their own organization.
This can be difficult and expensive but is necessary to ensure continued budget and the long-term use of an assessment, based on an understanding that it works. You cannot say, “Candidates who score high on X show higher performance, so we will prioritize these candidates in the hiring process”, without validating that data.
Reliable Results
It’s crucial that any test have anti-faking measures and have measures with which to measure that candidates are lying, giving the answers they think you want to hear, and quite simply, panicking. Any test that relies on questions like “I am a hard worker” without using alternative measures to test those results in more subtle ways to validate those answers probably won’t function very well.
Once you have a test, it’s important that any HR or recruitment professionals using it actually take the assessment themselves, and hopefully multiple times. Understanding the assessment, what answering it is like, and what candidates are likely to see in relation to their role is critical to assessing whether results are reliable or not.
Customization
Many HR assessments cannot be implemented off-the-shelf. While some out-of-the-box solutions exist, most behavioral and competency assessments will have to be tweaked and updated to meet individual organization’s and should align with a behavioral or competency framework, if one is in place.
For larger organizations, this may mean adjusting assessments, assessment type, and assessment questions based on role, development tract, and whether the intended candidate is intended for eventual leadership development or not. Therefore, it may be crucial that any HR assessment framework you adopt be customizable, or that the provider offers internal analysis and setup to ensure implemented solutions meet your organization’s needs.
No matter what your organization is intending to measure, it’s critical that your assessments be up for the job. This often means choosing assessments that are scientifically validated, reliable, resistant to gaming (cheating), customizable, and able to provide diverse needs based on the candidate, the role, and the hiring manager in question.
For many organizations, this does mean choosing multiple assessments, optimizing each for their own hiring process, and creating a process to improve and further optimize those assessment over time as you begin to collect your own data.
About the Author: Jocelyn Pick
