Win ‘Talent’ Using the Right Assessments

Traditional recruitment and hiring strategies that leverage candidate resumes, social media profiles and interviews, are no longer enough. To maximize value from their biggest asset i.e. employees, businesses must ensure they have the right people in the right positions, and align their teams with organizational goals. This is where psychometric assessments -tests to screen job applicants on factors such as cognitive ability, problem solving skills, personality, preferences, and motivation – add value.

56%> of Indian companies were using psychometric assessments as early as 2016, according to a Willis Towers Watson report. Companies such as Mahindra Group, PayTM, Practo have been leveraging the power of customized assessments to improve the quality of hires and reduce attrition. Of the various types of psychometric assessments, those that assess candidates’ cognitive abilities, personality, behavior, and domain knowledge are widely used. These assessments help ensure that employees have the right skills, knowledge, ability and temperament to thrive, contribute and grow in their roles.

Using the right assessments across the employee life cycle can help maximize employee value- from hiring to talent development. Here’s how:

Ensuring job and cultural fit:

In today’s fast paced business environment, organizational success depends on the ability of resources to adapt to rapidly evolving changes. Assessing job and cultural fit of candidates for specific roles, helps enhance productivity and reduce attrition, by identifying who is likely to thrive and in which environment. Defining specific metrics such as reducing time-to-hire and time-to-productivity can help drive greater value from assessments. 81% of Indian companies use psychometric testing at the entry level and 77% at the senior level.

Determining behavioral fit:

Personality assessments help evaluate individuals underlying personal characteristics with the objective of predicting behaviors that are of interest to an organization. For instance, employees applying for customer service positions will need to demonstrate empathy and ability to help customers, while those gunning for leadership positions will need to demonstrate the ability to lead people and handle stress. Behavioral assessments can be used in mass hiring scenarios and are typically customized for specific roles and jobs with the objective of eliminating bias from the hiring process.

Driving workforce development:

Organizations increasingly realize the role of human talent in creating and maintaining competitive advantage, and are investing heavily in nurturing employees. On one hand, targeted assessments can help businesses upskill and right size resources, as well as promote and recognize high achieving performers. On the other, they play a crucial role in building leadership bench strength, succession planning, and business continuity and management development programs. Assessments can also be used in the pre and post training stages to evaluate the impact of training initiatives.

Build a culture of continuous evaluation driven by analytics to raise the bar on recruitment:

To get the most out of psychometric assessments, it’s important to build a practice of ongoing evaluation. But this is where most companies fail! According to a joint MeritTrac-SHRM study, only 45% of organizations that use scientific assessments actually track the impact and objectively validate the value delivered. The trick to getting this right is to integrate analytics with talent assessment strategies. This helps define the right assessment metrics, fine-tune according to real time insights, and create a centralized repository of assessment results. 70% of recruitment executives who are feeding talent analytics data into their candidate assessment strategies say they are seeing positive results. Amway India, for instance, leverages Predictive Index (PI) analysis to fast-track its recruitment process and zero-in on right-fit candidate profiles.

The benefits of using the right assessments in a large country such as India are innumerable. It ensures that no talent is overlooked by considering talent from all corners of the country without language or regional bias. Bottom line: taking a holistic approach to assessments can help create a high performing, engaged workforce, resulting in superior competitiveness for organizations.