How Scientifically-crafted Assessments will Help Find the Right Talent and Catalyze a Business's Success

The industry has now realized the importance of the Human Resource function – from a body that just ensures the smooth functioning of employees, to cover a complete realm of activities like sourcing, hiring, training, organizational development and also retaining employees.

On-boarding and training of a new employee requires considerable thought and deliberation, and plays an extremely significant role. Assessments are used to not only to simplify this process of hiring, but also to have the right fitment of the available candidates.

Why Assessments?

The thought about assessments triggers a sense of nostalgia that we experienced back during our days of school. While it was exciting to some, the vast majority of them had a sense of fretting, and would like to forget such feelings. However, assessments in the corporate sector began as a way to find out if a person is fit for that particular company or position. These assessments – often called recruitment assessments, talent assessments or pre-employment assessments; tests the candidates against certain pre-requisites of the role or responsibilities. Such test results, provides the company a much clear and scientific indication of how close a match the candidate can fit the bill for a particular role that the organization’s hiring for.

How do these assessments work?

The talent assessments are often conducted in multiple stages, starting with an aptitude test, followed by a written test and finally an oral or Face-to-Face interview. Many companies have additional steps such as group discussions, presentations, simulations or role play’s based on the roles that are on offer.

When will tests actually work?

A recent study by MeritTrac and SHRM revealed that around 30% of companies hire people based on their gut feel and do not use scientific methods to validate the data of assessment used. The significant challenge that organizations face in the adoption of assessment tools is cost consideration and the inability to justify ROI. Most firms feel that talent assessment tools do not offer any impact on the type of recruits. The reason for this is that companies do not use the right kind of talent assessment tools and do not validate the results scientifically.

1. Customized tests

To optimize costs, the HR departments are being asked to hire for a specific job / assignment as and when required. This demands agile recruitment processes, creative sourcing models and tailored assessments delivered in the innovative manner. Most companies use a catch all test for any recruitment position just for the sake of it. What companies should do is customize tests for each and every position as per the job description. Certain job roles do not require highly-customized tests, but there are jobs that require specific skillets and to assess the same, highly-specialized tests should be used to be able to judge the outcome without any discrepancy.

2. Psychometric Tests

Many companies disregard the importance of psychometric tests and overlook its role. However, psychometric tests can help solve a lot of problems if used correctly. They help assess the psyche of an individual along many parameters such as their ability to meet deadlines, their attitude under pressure etc. It also helps beat gut feeling and bias in hiring.The benefit of using psychometric testing is that the outcome gathered provides an accurate summary of a potential employee’s skills and abilities. The format and scientific outset of this test also strengthens the results from being ‘faked’.

3. Social media, simulations and Artificial intelligence

The role of social media in the hiring process has been discussed for a long time. For starters, the availability of prospective employees on different platforms, their level of engagement and the possibility to identify, attract and engage existing and potential employees cannot be debated. This has made social media a definite sourcing channel for a large number of organizations. All of us leave our daily footprint on these channels and the amount of data that is available about individual candidates cannot be imagined. There are a large number of experiments that are happening on how Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning tools can identify patterns and make inferences about abilities, interest levels and fitment potential of the candidates. The study with SHRM also revealed that about 80% of organizations have adopted or is looking to adopt social media profiling tools and online simulations in the near future.

4. Validation of Tests

While a variety of tests can be conducted to assess a candidate, these tests must be validated scientifically for them to have any worth. As per MeritTrac study with SHRM, 75% of organizations track and evaluate impact of assessment tool usage on the business, of which only 45% validate this impact through usage of data. Most interestingly, 55% of the organizations do not objectively measure the impact of the assessment tools on business, of which 25% do not even measure the impact. These are alarming figures which could influence the possibility to measuring the impact and returns of use of assessments. If validated properly, the worth of assessments can be determined and it would be easier for companies to assess the ROI based on how the quality of hires improves.

For assessments to have an impact, companies should start investing in scientific tools that are genuine and empirical in order for them to ensure the best quality in hires and catalyze the business’ success.