ASSESSMENT PRACTICES THAT INSULATE YOU FROM THE ELEMENTS
A quality employment assessment must include multiple safeguards designed to ensure data authenticity and system functionality
One winter morning I fulfilled one of my least favorite household duties by stepping outside in the early dawn chill to set out the trash. The wind greeted my Saturday morning stubble seru test tfl with a familiar slap in the face. With plumes of white smoke billowing from my lungs with every breath, I quickly remembered why I had delegated this chore to my oldest son. One word came to me-"BRRRR!" It took all of three steps to realize that I lacked adequate protection from the elements. Without the proper layers of insulation, I was at the mercy of whatever this cold Saturday morning decided to throw at me.
Some selection systems can leave you feeling exposed. Just as your body requires more coverage in the winter, it is imperative that your assessment process is properly outfitted to meet the elements of the 21st century job market and offer the highest level of protection.
How can an assessment system protect your interests? Organizations need protection from the following elements:
Misrepresentations made by new job candidates
The hiring of high-risk candidates
Concerns over the legality of the overall hiring process
When an assessment system offers all of the features mentioned on these pages, the organization can be more confident in its hiring decisions and in the unassailable legality of the process.
This article describes assessment design elements-represented symbolically by articles of clothing-that human resource leaders should look for to ensure they are getting maximum protection from a pre-employment assessment system. Grab your mug of hot chocolate and a warm blanket, toss a log on the fire, and spend some time enhancing your wardrobe to include specific layers of technology that will shelter you from the elements as you leverage your selection process to hire top talent.
Boots: Profiles Provide Traction to the Selection Process
In an assessment system, the definition of a profile can be simply stated as any guideline that candidates are matched against to determine their suitability for the job. There are three approaches, or types, of profiles:
The-Higher-the-Better - this approach, though not technically a profile, assumes that more of a behavioral characteristic is always better. There are many drawbacks to this approach, but we will focus on the issue of obtaining accurate information from candidates. Simply put, if candidates know you are looking for more, they will tend to select responses that reflect more for each question. This approach does not provide you with the assurance of high quality responses from candidates.
Best Practice - the best practice profile relies on normative data (average across many companies) to create an optimum range for the dimension being measured. The down side is that it is a one-size-fits-all approach that does not capture the unique requirements of the position or the culture of your organization (see below).
Custom Ideal Profile - This type of profile reflects the behavioral makeup of the ideal candidate for your organization by first determining the optimum range for the dimension being measured through analysis of your incumbent employees (those already working in the target position) and then assigning a "weight," or level of importance, to every behavioral dimension being measured.
Of these three profile types, the custom ideal profile is recommended to provide the most protection.
Think of a custom ideal profile as a pair of warm boots. Custom ideal profiles should be fundamental components in your overall selection system just as warm boots are a vital part of your wardrobe on a cold day. The protective qualities of custom ideal profiles stem from their use of actual data from incumbents in a specific position, company, and industry, as well as the weighted values for each dimension.
Like snowflakes, no two custom ideal profiles are exact duplicates. In fact, similar job titles in two different companies are most often very different behaviorally across a large variety of dimensions.
Allow me to illustrate this point using another winter activity. In the snowmobile sales industry, dealerships employ salespeople to guide prospective clients through the shopping and buying process. One dealership may place a high value on "number of units sold." All of their seru test tfl focus, training, bonus structures, and incentive programs are geared toward selling a high volume of snowmobiles. Success in this type of sales position requires behavioral traits that drive rapid sales cycles from first contact to closing. Conversely, a dealership across town may place more emphasis on profit margin. Higher profits may be derived from selling models that are more expensive and adding multiple upgrades like a larger engine, more chrome, added accessories, special paint options, etc. This specific sales role requires a slower, more consultative sales approach. Successful salespeople would possess behavioral characteristics that encourage relationships, up-selling, and "quality over quantity." Both are sales roles, and both are in the same industry, but the two positions call for very different types of people, and therefore very different custom ideal profiles.
Like a good pair of boots, you need a custom ideal profile to keep you on firm footing and to steer your selection process well clear of some common misconceptions.
Misconception #1: "I can find an answer key that will tell me the correct answers to this assessment."
A valid assessment tool provides multiple-choice responses for several questions related to any one of dozens of dimensions. This results in a large number of ways to arrive at a value for a single dimension. Therefore, there are no right or wrong answers.
In an assessment system that uses custom ideal profiles, every candidate is matched against a unique profile. Custom ideal profiles are built on assessed incumbents and performance data in the position, so there is no way for a candidate to know how much or how little of one characteristic is important for the role.
When using custom ideal profiles, candidates have no knowledge of the on-the-job importance assigned to any given dimension. The importance of each dimension is crucial because to ensure a desirable score, you would have to align your responses perfectly to the dimensions with the highest priority. Interestingly, the actual importance of a dimension is often counterintuitive to a candidate's logical assumption.
In a well-designed system, candidates can only speculate which questions relate to which behavioral dimension, and what the best answer might be. This difficulty increases exponentially when a custom ideal profile is built on a large number of dimensions.
Misconception #2: "I will have a friend with more experience take the assessment for me who will score 'better.'"
A friend's responses are no more "correct" or "incorrect" than the true candidate's responses. Keep in mind that there should be no "right" or "wrong" answer. Everyone is a "fit" somewhere, and the custom ideal profile process is designed to match candidates that are the best fit for specific jobs. Having someone else take the assessment does not increase a candidate's chances because the friend may not be a good fit to the role.
By having a friend take the assessment, the candidate is at a serious disadvantage during the interview process. A good assessment generates interview questions and discussion topics directly from the candidate's responses in relation to the custom ideal profile. To see this charade through to the end, the candidate would have to force their friend to impersonate him in the face-to-face interview as well!
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