If you are a company looking to recruit a quality employee who will hit the ground running, fit in with the team and embrace the company culture, pre-employment assessments are a great way to find that perfect candidate.
With so many different types of recruitment assessment tests awash in the market (personality, aptitude, psychometric…), choosing what’s right for your specific needs and knowing how to utilise these tools to provide effective results can be a problematic and time consuming ‘job’ within itself!
Here are four tips any employer or HR manager must consider before choosing assessments for recruitment purposes:
1. Ensure assessments are valid
It’s very easy for any cowboy to put a test together which looks the part, but are the right questions being asked? With a mathematical question such as ‘what is 5+5=?’ for example, it’s easy to identify what the correct response should be.
Where questions are not so straightforward there is a need for technical analysis and proper research conducted to make any answer fit into a scale of validity.
It is crucial that any assessment worth considering is peer reviewed and backed up by Psychometricians and occupational Psychologists. This will come in the form of a technical manual designed to highlighting rationale details on how the assessment was developed along with how it is meant to be implemented.
If this sounds scientific, that’s because it is!
2. Pick the right assessment types according to your needs
Filtering out the qualities you are searching for from a prospective candidate efficiently will come from a wise choice assessment framework. After all, there’s no point testing someone’s data entry speed skills when this task will never be required as part of the role.
Multi-angle assessments which take into account an array of qualities such as aptitude, verbal reasoning and personality traits may be a good approach to take if looking for an all-rounder to fill that team leader role.
The more usable information you can ascertain the better however it’s wise to plan what you are looking to extract from the assessment process.
3. Understand how to benchmark results
Leading on from our second point, for your assessment to be effective you must be able to compare it against the specific benchmarks the role in question demands. Otherwise the test results may only be as useful as the candidate’s CV and covering letter which tell you he or she is “a great team player with strong work ethic.”
Having some form of rating scale will save you time and effort, allowing you to find the ‘cream of the crop’ with more ease.
4. Training & Support – Know how to effectively use the assessment results
So you’ve picked the best assessments and received a variety of answers from hundreds of candidates – what now?
It’s great to have a beautiful car, but if you haven’t taken any lessons to pass your driving test you’ll never get it off your driveway.
The same principle applies for recruitment assessments. Unless you are given proper training and support on how to effectively use the results of your assessments they are merely words and numbers on a page.
It’s important to find a company with the expertise to continually guide you through the ever evolving assessment process to make the experience a painless and effective one.