Transparency in the career marketplace is revered and feared, all based on what side of the door you’re standing on. Job seekers flock to sites like Glassdoor.com to see how your company or department has been rated by your coworkers and employees, giving prospective applicants a head start on screening you based on the experience of existing employees.
So why shouldn’t you expect the same level of transparency from your applicants? Ultimately, a standard interview is a crap shoot that will only help you get to know the face an applicant wants to share. Properly using an assessment test provides you with a structured way to make sure you’re placing the right person with the right position — increasing the likelihood of a career employee.
Pre-employment assessments are often used to filter potential candidates for a position based on personality, varied work-related skills or even ethics in the workplace.
The dream hiring goal is to find career employees because a high employee-turnover rate hurts the department and the company. According to the Wall Street Journal, the company will lose money because “it costs upwards of twice an employee’s salary to find and train a replacement.” Meanwhile, department moral will suffer because of long-term increased workloads.
How Valid Is an Assessment?
The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has a voice when it comes to employment testing. They recognize assessments as an effective part of the hiring process, but you need to be sure your assessments don’t violate any part of the American’s with Disabilities Act, or any other sort of anti-discrimination laws.
You can check directly with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission or with the company that will supply you with the assessment test.
The other important aspect regarding the validity of assessment tests is to remember that it’s one small part of the interview process. While an assessment test can be important, it should never be the deciding factor of employment. On that note, let’s look at some of the best uses of assessments in the hiring process with the eight tips below.
- Find the Right Judge
Just any employee shouldn’t be left to grade the results of an assessment. The Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology isn’t against the practice of using personality tests during the hiring process, but professional assessments require a qualified professional to interpret the results.
If you don’t have an industrial-organizational psychologist on staff to manage your assessments, speak to HR or contact the Society for Industrial and Organization Psychology for advice.
- Choose the Right Test
A clinical personality test isn’t the same as a work-related personality test. Legally, you can’t test your employees for mental health issues, but you can test for personality traits that would benefit a specific career or department. No one wants to hire a negative nurse or a too-shy public relations person. That’s where choosing the right test will come into play.
The right assessment can also help sort out an employee’s motivation for working for your company. Choose a model employee from each of your departments and give them a practice assessment. Use their scores as a target for future employees.
- Test the Assessment
Now that you’ve chosen the perfect test, round up your employees and ask them to take it. You’ll accomplish several things:
- Verify the questions make sense to testers. If your model employees struggle with the test, then it isn’t the right test for your company.
- Establish if the test works. If your top employees produce unsatisfactory test results, it might be an issue with the test.
- Find what employment hole needs to be filled. If test results show that one more joker in the accounting department might undo the balance, hire someone serious.
- Act as a Filter
With so many job seekers out there, using an online assessment pre-interview can help you whittle the numbers down before you start lining up in-person interviews.
Once you’ve decided what you need to look for, you can prompt all applicants to take the assessment online prior to the interview process. If you have 100 applicants, but 80 have take-charge personalities when you need someone willing to be a follower, you’ll be able to segregate your prospects more in depth.
- Hire Based on Needs
With or without an assessment, hire based on what your department needs, not what you want. Your potential new hire is bubbly, outgoing and might even enjoy baking for coworkers, but your love of cupcakes won’t save the department during audit season. If you need a highly focus and independent person, make sure that’s who you actually hire.
The overarching goal is to increase the odds of hiring top-notch employees for your company. Do you want to increase company moral, minimize employee turnover and save time and money? Just as you do when you purchase any product, start researching the right assessment for your company today.