One way to improve your odds of success is to use an assessment or two to help you learn more about the person, to get below the surface and to put unbiased and useful information into your hands before you make the critical decision to hire a candidate.The assessment marketplace is a complicated one, cluttered with a dizzying assortment of tools. How do you find the right assessment for the job?When we look at assessment tools we are evaluating them against five simple rules. The tools that we recommend for use in selecting candidates must meet ALL five of these criteria;
Does this assessment have a distortion scale that tells us clearly how confident we can be in the accuracy of the information we are reading about the candidate? Knowing this score will give us perspective on what we are reading in the report.
The tool must measure what matters. This means that top performers and poor performers in the same job must consistently score differently. One tool does not work for all jobs or all companies. The tool selected must have some connection to the four critical aspects of fit – fit with the job, fit with the manager, fit with team and fit with the organization.
No tool must ever be used to pass or fail a candidate. The assessment provides only part of the information you should consider when you are evaluating a candidate’s fit. A tool, when used property, should tell you “if you hire this person this is what you are going to get”. Beware of any assessment that automatically advances or disqualifies candidates, purporting to make the decision for you.
A tool is just the first part of the face-to-face interview. Assessments must provide the recruiter with an interview guide or placement report that is customized based on how the candidate answered the questions. A suitable report will not only give the interviewer information on what questions to ask, but should also tell them why to ask them and what to listen for in the response.
And finally, the information collected during the hiring process all too often ends up never being used again after the person is hired. A HiringSmart approved assessment tool provides a coaching report that can be used throughout the employee life cycle to assist with onboarding, future development and succession planning.
There are two broad classes of assessments in the marketplace… Ipsative tools and Normative tools.
Ipsative tools are the largest group, including names you’ll recognise like DiSC, Myers Briggs, Thomas International, Reid Report, LIMRA and others. Many are good instruments, but there’s a critical problem with using ipsative tools in hiring: their basic construct.
Ipsative tools ask candidates to describe themselves from different perspectives and because it’s all derived from the candidate’s perspective of themselves you have no way of knowing how accurate – or truthful – the results of the assessment are. It’s hard to know how much confidence to have in the output.
Normative tools, on the other hand, take a completely different approach. Instead of asking the candidate about themselves, they compare the candidate’s attitudes and core behaviours to those of the general population, essentially telling you how similar or different they are to ‘most people’ in areas that will be critical to their success on the job.
It is this critical difference in construct that gives normative assessments their objectivity and the ability to reliably predict how the candidate will fit with their manager, in their job, with their coworkers, and in the culture of the organization.
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