Gone are the days when employers used to follow graphology and other pseudoscience techniques to hire the best talent for their workforce. Now, predicting or pre-analyzing the job performance of any candidate is widely done with many different types of pre-employment tests.
There are so many assessment options out there today that most companies choose to ignore the topic altogether or continue to use what they have always used (even if it isn’t working for them) because they think the cost to change or do something different is just too high!
So this post is for those who want to make the right decision(s) the first time, or who are finally fed up with the results that their current employee assessment tools and processes are delivering that they are willing to bite the bullet and move on. It is also for new managers or senior managers in new companies who want to quickly make a huge impact on their new team’s productivity.
The following list of 4 Key Things to know before selecting (or changing) your employee assessment approach are cumulative, meaning the more of them that you can incorporate into your organization the higher your chance of improving employee performance! They are also in order of simpler to more complex, and not many employee assessment providers or consultants can provide your company with ALL 4!
Use a Whole-Person Assessment Tool
Most companies currently using pre-employment tests use a test that measures only one, or maybe two, type of characteristics. The most common ones that fit this description (without mentioning any particular names) are the personality and/or interests tests. Whole-person tests go much further by adding skills or aptitudes to the mix, so you can see not only if they can ACT like your current top performers, but also get a feel for if they can PERFORM like them
One Size Employee Assessment Doesn’t Fit All
Most employee assessment sellers sell one type of assessment, and they use it with all their clients and for all their roles or positions. That is like saying one type of car is a best fit for all kinds of driving situations. We all know that isn’t true, and neither is one employee assessment the best fit for ALL hiring situations.
Most assessment providers will try to sell you on their tools being the best (because that is all they have to sell to you), but the best will provide you with a list of options to best meet the various hiring needs you have within your company, and be able to demonstrate the pros and cons (and they all have cons) of all the options – then let you choose among the options.
One Benchmark (for a Particular Position) Doesn’t Fit All
Using an assessment that has one benchmark or job profile for a role (such as Loan Officer) can also be misleading or non-optimal. Do you think that the skills or aptitudes tests for a top performing Loan Officer look the same for a Loan Officer in a small-town bank, a Loan Officer in a mortgage company, and a Loan Officer in a Big-5 bank who services global or international companies? At PeopleRight we have measured all of the above – and we can show you that they don’t look all the same! So, companies need to use assessment tools that have the ability to create custom benchmarks from the results of top performers in THEIR particular company – and not use those that worked somewhere else.
All Employee Assessment Tools Can Benefit From Advanced Analytics
Even if you have used a whole-person tool, chosen from a variety of employee assessment tools, and have built custom benchmarks based on your company’s top performers results, there still could be lots of work to do. Through the application of machine learning and AI we are learning that some characteristics just mean more than others when it comes to job fit and job performance.
We are finding that we can help companies who are only doing these first three things see a major improvement in performance by implementing this fourth strategy. The reason is that new technology and more data can help you tailor your results to know exactly what characteristics are most important (in terms of predicting future performance).
This is especially true when a company measures multiple key performance indicators (KPIs) for a given role, and they want a pattern that can help them predict performance in ALL of the KPIs, and not just one of them. Most assessment providers cannot provide this service because they don’t have the resources to do it, so you need to find a consultant who can provide this additional service.
Summary
So, no matter what you have done in the past, you can now do better (in terms of hiring for job fit and performance) if you incorporate ALL 4 of these ideas into your pre-employment testing strategies.
PeopleRight believes in offering avant-garde tools that help employers make well-informed hiring decisions. Instead of filtering candidates by just testing, the hiring tools offered by PeopleRight give you the freedom to validate top-performance benchmarks, coach new hires and uncover predictive information about candidates that no standardized tests can provide.
In simple words, employee testing is a very strong method to hire talented resources, but you need more than just testing to hire and keep more top performers; and this is what PeopleRight excels at. Click here to learn more…