Assessments: Leap of Faith or Confident Step Forward?

The decision to hire someone will always be an act of personal judgment. However, decisions are rarely better than the data that supports them. The use of assessments or pre-employment testing as a form of candidate evaluation can add valuable, objective information to support the hiring decision. The approach you use to select and implement assessments can be making a leap of faith or it can be a confident step forward in raising the quality of the hiring decision.

Assessments are a resource used to discover something about an individual. The big question often asked by people contemplating the use of assessment is “Does it work?” It is an important question. When you implement any business tool, it is important to be able to act with confidence. Unfortunately, “Does it work?” may not be the best question to ask. The reason being is that the answer may be misleading.

Assessment should be viewed as a form of measurement discipline. As in any other business process, properly calibrating the measurement system is critical. Calibrating assessments to your hiring requirements determines how well the measurements will ad value.

Leaps of Faith
One of the most common leaps of faith made in the use of assessments is driven by one question: “Is this assessment valid?” This Yes-No question does not obtain an answer that helps you determine if the assessment is calibrated in a manner that makes it appropriate for your hiring needs. A more productive probe is: “Tell me about the performance metrics and job behaviors used in the validation analysis.” The answer to this question will help you learn how similar or dissimilar the data in the analysis is to the type of performance you need.

A second common leap of faith is using small Norm Groups. Sometimes assessment vendors suggest using a sample of high performers as Norm Group. To be considered as statistically significant, the group sample should be 100 or more individuals in the same job or from the candidate pool for one job. With small groups of 10, 25, or even 50, any results may be due to chance. This means that a second group of 10 or 20 could produce a very different result. It is important that the number of individuals in the Norm Group is large enough to be significant and very similar in make-up to the nature of individuals with whom you will compare the results.

Calibrating for Confidence
Assessments are calibrated with a variety of methods. The two most commonly discussed methods are conducting a validation analysis and creating norm groups. Validation is a structured business case study and analysis of how response patterns to the assessment predict performance metrics associated with on-the-job behaviors. Norm Groups are the results or scores achieved by a defined population, such as applicants for a specific job, or .current employees in a specific job. It is very important to understand which on-the-job behaviors were used in the validation as well as the characteristics of the group who participated in the validation.

Conducting your own validation analysis is the best way to implement assessments with a confident step forward. A validation analysis documents the business impact from using assessments as a measurement discipline in candidate evaluation. The results of the analysis reports the economic value of hiring candidates more likely to achieve desired on-the job results.

When you use the validation analysis conducted by another company to evaluate your candidates, it is like saying, I want to hire folks just like they are hiring. It also by default states your business is not unique and that you are not different. By using the validation analysis conducted by another company, you are also taking steps to become more like the other company. Is that what you really want?

Before you take a leap of faith into the realm of assessment, take a confident step forward and give us a call. We will help you learn more about how validation analysis can be applied for a competitive advantage. Discover how success can be measured in your staffing process.