For more than two decades of hiring, human resources professionals have been taking analog processes and making them digital. That “digital transformation” automated steps in talent acquisition and allowed organizations to effectively maintain and update databases.
As we move further into the 2020s, a second-wave transformation is taking hold: We’re rethinking talent acquisition, to not only make it a mobile-first and nimble process, but to make it more strategic for the wider business. “Talent intelligence” is helping both job seekers and employers be smarter in how they select each other, leveraging predictive analytics to identify good fits based on evidence.
Here, we’ll focus on one growing source of that evidence: assessment data. Innovations in design are enabling assessments to easily become part of an evidence-based approach to the hiring process. The addition of this candidate data is transformative because it creates a fuller picture of each job seeker at scale. With a greater richness of information now available about each and every candidate, conventional hiring approaches that skip this step are left looking like a game of chance. Keeping this in mind, let’s talk about how assessments can be part of your talent intelligence strategy.
What do “assessments” make you think of?
Let’s be honest, the word “assessment” isn’t the sexiest term. If anything, it can have some uncomfortable connotations at a personal level. “Assessment” can sound like a person’s fate is on the line, you might even be on the verge of being embarrassed, and there’s plenty of stress to go around.
For leaders in talent acquisition, thinking about assessments might be negative in a different way. Will candidates hate them? Can we trust the results? Does collecting assessment data mean we’re unleashing AI and creating new headaches as a result? How will our team know what to do with the assessment data we receive, and then be sure we use that data in the most effective and ethical way?
As a first step to answering these questions, let’s go back in time to understand the history of pre-hire assessments, and where they’ve landed today.
A brief history of assessments.
Although assessments these days are at the forefront of conversations about transformative technology, they’re an old concept that’s been around for over a century. The idea has always been the same: to solve “a practical problem more accurately and more efficiently than human judgment,” as industry psychologists Ryne Sherman and Robert Hogan explained last year.
When we rely on human evaluation that’s not systematically evidence-based, conclusions about candidates tend to differ from one person to the next. Individual biases enter in, as do variables like the decision maker’s mood, level of information, and perspective. Assessments were designed to standardize evaluations of individuals and provide a way to compare one person to another in a consistent, unbiased way.
It’s important to distinguish here between the quizzes that have been an entertaining staple online for years (“What color is your aura? How much of a Drama Queen are you? What’s your spirit animal?”) and an actual psychometric tool that allows us to make conclusions about a person’s match for a job, mastery of a language, or other metric. A worthy assessment is carefully designed and tested, with scoring determined by first examining the performance of a representative sample of individuals. That’s a far cry from all those online surveys that tell you you’re Belle from Beauty and the Beast one minute and then the raccoon in Pocahontas five minutes later.
Assessment products run the gamut from measures of language fluency to those that tap “fluid intelligence”. The psychological theories that many assessments are based on generally harken back to the middle of the 20th century. Assessments have been used as part of candidate selection for decades, with early use in the military that goes back over 100 years. Assessment development and advancements in statistical methods went hand in hand, as work was developed to establish how a test could be considered both valid and reliable.
A worthy assessment is carefully designed and tested, with scoring determined by first examining the performance of a representative sample of individuals.
Assessments were first completed in a paper and pencil format, and many were lengthy. For example, one measure of personality and psychopathy, the MMPI, consisted of 567 items in its earliest version. A 1949 version of a cognitive assessment created by an influential figure in the field, Raymond Cattell, consisted of three main components, the first with eight separate subtests and the second and third with three subtests each. Even when used in job applications, assessments could easily require 45 minutes or more to complete.
More recent innovations in assessments have sought to make the experience much more streamlined and user-friendly. What if you really ARE the raccoon from Pocahontas? Recognizing the value of having an enjoyable and engaging experience while taking an assessment, “gamified” assessments have emerged in the last 10 years. These seek to increase engagement and make the assessment-taking experience more familiar to a talent pool that has grown up with increasingly sophisticated digital media and video games. Although the effort may indeed make assessments seem more appealing to some, there are concerns about their validity for all test-takers (not simply those skilled at or accustomed to gaming), among others. Other innovators have simply streamlined the assessment experience and made test items visually engaging without the added concerns of gamification.
The impact of AI on assessments.
These days, there’s growing awareness of the value of introducing AI into numerous platforms, including HR technology. There are several ways in which that addition is elevating hiring in ways that make it better for everyone, including both candidates and recruiters. An advantage of AI is in the scalability, with tasks that previously were a drain on recruiter time now able to be handled by AI in a way that feels personal to candidates. But the intent has never been to completely hand over the reins to AI. In fact, AI’s key value-add is to enable processes to become more human. Technology can gather and contextualize information far faster than humans can, but hiring decisions remain a human task.
The importance of humans in decision making is also a guiding principle of using assessments in the hiring process. In the same way that the word “assessment” doesn’t have the most soothing brand identity, the notion of using technology to measure something about a person and then render a yes/no verdict is enough to make any of us wary. That’s why an assessment should simply provide information, facilitate understanding of why that information is relevant, and then get out of the way.
Still, there’s a lot of confusion about whether “assessments” and “AI” are inherently intertwined. The answer is a resounding no. Some products that assess candidates, like some video interviewing platforms, do use AI. But there’s nothing baked into assessments that requires or even routinely makes use of AI. In many ways an assessment is an old-fashioned product that has always been judged according to five criteria: validity (it measures what it claims to measure, and the concept actually matters to the job), reliability (it accurately produces a person’s real score), standardization (the assessment experience is the same for everyone), objectivity (performance doesn’t depend on other people), and scale (test-takers can be compared directly to each other).
When it comes to the outcome from an assessment, the scoring is based on comparing the test-taker against other test-takers, and then applying that to provide some indicator of the “why does this matter?” question. An example is a match score that shows how well one fits the job they’ve applied for. There’s no black box of AI; there’s just underlying scoring criteria that is used to calculate contextualized results for each candidate.
How assessments can improve candidate selection.
As you think about what impact assessments could have on your hiring process, consider first the criteria you use now to decide which of your job applicants advances in the selection process.
For many organizations, the first answer is “it depends”. Often, practices depend on the region, the requisition, the season, and the hiring manager. In other words, everyone is doing a little bit of everything, and criteria are not as consistent as they should be. Beyond that, answers tend to fall into two broad categories:
1. Practical factors like the candidate’s availability to work certain shifts.
2. Conventional criteria, like having had a certain job title in the past.
All this means is that many people who apply for your jobs have a bad experience. They get passed up due to the shift availability they select. They’re ghosted because they don’t apply at the just-right time, having responded to a requisition that’s already closed. Apart from the damage that’s doing to your employment brand, that waste of candidates is also a major source of TA spend.
There’s considerable room for improvement in the hiring process, both because it’s a long-standing resource drain and because it’s a net negative for job seekers.
How can assessment data help you course-correct all this? Simply put, assessments help you bring strategy to your flow of candidates. That’s a key differentiator between a hiring process that includes assessment data and one that does not. Let’s dive in to explore additional specific advantages of using assessments in talent acquisition.
Assessments make candidate evaluation more efficient.
Assessment data prioritizes candidates who are a good fit according to criteria like personality profile, interests, or learning potential, thereby enabling TA teams to use their time more efficiently. You’re not screening out candidates based on assessment scores, you’re sorting them according to an objective criterion that’s evidence-based for its predictive power. That’s a big improvement over the previous leading criteria of when a candidate applied, what availability they reported, or whether an exact keyword appeared in their resume. With the benefit of assessment data, recruiters limit the time they use on candidates who are poor fits, thereby freeing up more time to focus on those with the highest potential.
Assessments help standardize candidate selection.
Assessment scores introduce a criterion that compares everyone against the same standard, mitigating the impact of the “human standard” that differs from one hiring manager to another. A reputable assessment will not simply feed you a candidate’s raw scores or a tally of their responses. Assessment scores contextualize the candidate’s results, to help you understand how their results compare to similar others, and/or the implications of their results, such as their fit for a role. With that, you’re not simply considering one candidate at a time in isolation; you’re effectively considering that individual in a systematic fashion as they compare to others and align with the role they’re seeking. By adding assessment data points to the information you consider about applicants, you’re mitigating the effects of individual biases. At the same time, you boost the likelihood that you’ll appropriately elevate high-potential candidates that you previously would’ve passed up.
A “fit” isn’t always a fit: assessments lower hiring costs.
Collecting no assessment data from candidates can result in hires who are “good on paper" but poorly suited to the job they were hired to do. Why? Consider a candidate who has applied for a merchandising job.
Imagine that the hiring manager is excited to note that the candidate has two years of experience. During the interview, the candidate uses the word "ideas" several times, along with "mixing it up," and "that makes me wonder." From a personality perspective, these comments reveal high Openness. That's an aspect of personality that is associated with welcoming change, being curious, and having a focus on the future.
Without personality data to bring attention to this, the hiring manager is focused only on the fact that the candidate checks off the qualifications boxes, so she offers her the job. What's left unaddressed: The employer is a traditional retailer whose appeal is in its 70-year history, while this candidate’s personality thrives on innovation, trying new avenues, and imagining alternative outcomes.
With cost per hire starting at $2,000 for entry-level roles, the costs of interviewing and onboarding a weak-fit hire are considerable. Consider too the costs that are harder to quantify, such as a poor-fit hire’s constrained productivity while in the role, and the opportunity cost of not spending that time and money on someone who would’ve been a good fit.
Assessments slow down turnover.
When assessment data is used alongside a job profile to generate a candidate’s match score for that job, a hiring team can see at a glance how well the individual fits the role. In the case of personality data, that information has been shown to predict on-the-job outcomes, including a new hire’s length of tenure. That’s because personality is a core driver of “soft skills,” like having a positive mindset, sensing others’ needs and opinions, adapting to change, and remaining focused in stressful situations.
When the demands of a job and the personality profile of an individual line up well, the employee is likely to initiate a positive feedback loop in which their own skill and sense of fulfillment drives further satisfaction. On the other hand, when there’s a mismatch, that new hire finds their role fatiguing, boring, or stressful. Not only does their performance suffer, they are unlikely to remain on the job for long.
Assessments are good for candidates.
Collecting assessment data from candidates helps you treat your candidate pool well. Why? An assessment in a job application helps candidates understand what they’re a good fit for, and what they want in a role. The best assessments will provide candidate-facing content that helps job seekers learn about themselves. Anyone who has spent time in a position for which they were not a good fit knows that those periods can be difficult to recover from. Bringing a person into a role that they will not enjoy, may not perform well in, and may end up leaving on poor terms is a disruption to the life of that member of your community. It may even be considered a risk factor that can undermine their career focus and ability to contribute to the workforce in a more suitable role elsewhere.
An important consideration for candidates is the experience of taking the assessment itself. Innovations in assessments now enable an engaging and candidate-friendly experience that collects assessment data without a significant time commitment. Assessments need not be a tedious series of questions. They can include simple response choices and immersive visuals that feel more like something you’d opt to do for fun or curiosity. We’ll consider some details of that candidate experience below. But first, let’s take a look at some of the more common types of assessments so you know what options exist.
The different types of assessments and what they measure.
Adding an assessment to your hiring process can take different routes. There are several metrics that assessments can collect from candidates. Whatever combination of tools you select, keep in mind what you’re learning from each. You’ll gain the most value if your product gives you actionable information directly relevant to your jobs. With each, consider the benefit to your hiring process, how readily your teams will be able to incorporate that information, and the cost to candidates in their time, effort, and feelings about their experience.
Skills assessments: Screen candidates for must-haves.
A straightforward type of assessment is a skills assessment. When certain proficiencies are necessary to perform a job, employers can utilize a skills assessment to ensure that a candidate clears the threshold in their knowledge and ability. In this category, you might measure language fluency, knowledge of relevant policies and governance, coding skills, and more. This automates the screening process to ensure that recruiters don’t invest time on candidates who are deficient in their pre-training. It serves to verify what a candidate might claim on their resume, and can effectively self-screen candidates who would likely underperform on the job.
The downsides of a skills assessment include depending too much on that single data point, and therefore neglecting other factors that drive candidate potential, like their interest in learning and motivation to succeed. Combining a skills assessment with another measure can help gain a more holistic view of the candidate.
Cognitive assessments: Cultivate high potential.
Cognitive assessments don’t test acquired knowledge, like a skills assessment or a college entrance exam. They are instead an indicator of what psychologists call “fluid intelligence,” or a person’s learning potential. This is called their “General Mental Ability (GMA),” a well-established concept in psychology also sometimes referred to as the “G Factor.”
There may be various reasons why adding a cognitive assessment makes sense. One such scenario might be when the pool of available candidates with specific skills is small, and new hires will therefore need to learn on the job via formal or informal training periods. In that case, you’ll want to optimize the likelihood that a new hire will be able to achieve the needed proficiency as quickly as possible. Another case is simply when the job will involve some cognitive demands, like building a base of product or procedural knowledge, making decisions, and communicating information to others — elements of a wide swath of roles.
What does higher GMA look like? It means that someone is able to understand new material relatively quickly, and can then turn around and apply their new knowledge to a variety of situations and issues. They’ll be more likely to consider numerous factors at once instead of relying on just the most recent piece of information or the one that’s the most widely discussed. They anticipate outcomes using evidence, relying less on guesses, hunches, and their perceived intuition. In short, they’re more likely to be described as “quick learners.”
How do we measure GMA? There are various approaches, including focusing on verbal or mathematical skills. The various components of GMA (verbal, mathematical, memory, spatial reasoning, etc) are all found to correlate strongly with each other, so an assessment can measure just one major component and be considered a good GMA measure overall. An example task that many test-takers find engaging involves spatial visualization and pattern recognition, a task that often feels more like a puzzle challenge rather than a stressful exam.
Interests assessments: Find candidates who love the job.
Each of us is interested in our own selection of topics and ways of spending time, which then drives the activities we enjoy, hobbies we pursue, and jobs that we’re motivated to explore. Researchers have studied human interests as they relate to careers. The “Holland theory of vocational interests” identifies six broad categories of interests. An example is “Conventional” work interests, which include structured, discrete tasks like updating the inventory of medical supplies at a pharmacy. Another is “Investigative” tasks that require analysis and research, like writing a report about land use policies or completing a data analysis project. Interests have an impact on a person’s fit for a role, and there’s a variety of evidence that shows a benefit to holding a position that more closely aligns with one’s combination of interests.
Understanding that combination of interests is important in its own right. For example, let’s say an individual falls into the “Artistic” interest category, with an enjoyment of the performing and visual arts and opportunities to be creative. When that person also has a high interest in the “Social” category, enjoying guiding and advocating for others, that combination would be well-suited to being an art instructor. When Artistic interests are instead combined with the hands-on physical nature of the “Realistic” interest category, for example, a better fit might be working in set design.
Insights into the alignment between a candidate’s interests and the everyday demands of a role can help organizations anticipate whether the candidate is likely to thrive in the role and have a longer tenure. This is one way to establish a person’s “fit” for a job. Another major one is the final type of assessment we’ll review: personality assessments.
Personality assessments: Identify the soft skills that are great fits.
Personality assessments are perennially popular, not just as hiring tools but in pop culture. The well-known Meyers-Briggs test and its combinations of “ESTJs” and “INFPs” have been the subject of numerous books over the years, focused on empowering readers to achieve job success, unlock their “secret” selves, choose a field of study, and undergo spiritual growth, among others.
Despite that popularity, the Meyers-Briggs personality test is widely understood to have little to no “oomph” when it comes to predicting future on-the-job behavior. The reason may lie in its origins — it’s simply a theory of how to characterize personality. In other words, it’s a guess. That’s a limitation marking every assessment that’s based on theories or assumptions. Without a data-based origin story, assessments like these are an entertaining way to reflect on oneself, but they’re misplaced as screening tools.
The difference between a “nope” and an “absolutely yes” in assessment quality derives from what is being measured, and why. When you’re measuring an idea, the ability of that mere theory to translate predictably into later real-world behavior is precarious at best. Instead of the proverbial “garbage in, garbage out,” a robust assessment is grounded in evidence. “Data in, data out,” if you will. Enter the framework widely considered to be the gold standard in personality science: the Five Factor model. It’s the first and only model of personality that is based on data.
Why the Big Five model works so much better than Meyers-Briggs in candidate selection.
We call the Five Factor approach, commonly known as the Big Five, an “empirical model” because it’s not a theory, it’s the result of data analysis. What data is it derived from, exactly? It’s based on the data of natural language use. Words used across languages to describe people have been shown to cluster into five distinct dimensions. When the use of five factors became the norm in the 1980s, researchers began to note relationships between the factors and workplace outcomes, a finding replicated across types of jobs regardless of the complexity, training and experience required.
Every job has its everyday rhythms. Picture a fast-paced role requiring precision and customer interaction, like a front of house position in a restaurant. That job is a great fit for some personalities and a bad fit for others. It requires keeping up to date with the latest menu information and having a focus on details to get orders 100% correct every time. A top performer needs a good memory to keep track of requests, the ability to sense even indirect customer feedback, the energy to be on the move, and a friendly, accommodating persona. You can see how it’s not a good fit for someone who likes a slow pace, a person who is inwardly focused, or one who is especially soft-spoken or shows little emotion.
An advantage of the Big Five is the extent of its coverage. With its five dimensions, it covers the range of behaviors that people display at work. Let’s look at the dimension of Openness to illustrate this breadth. This dimension alone captures:
- Repetitive tasks vs unpredictability on the job
- Opportunities to learn new skills and duties vs comfort with staying the same
- Creative approaches vs practical steps
- Inviting problem-solving vs preference for fewer challenges
With the other four dimensions, the Big Five has wide reach. That’s why an assessment used in candidate selection that is based on the Big Five is likely to predict outcomes well. Simply put, it doesn’t miss anything that would go on to become an issue in the workplace.
How to determine what assessment is right for you.
There’s a lot to consider in the assessment space. Here are three must-haves for your list of criteria to consider.
Consider the candidate’s experience.
An assessment could theoretically achieve great psychometric results, but if real-world candidates shy away from it, leave it incomplete at a high rate, or misinterpret it, then all that psychometric value is lost. The right balance must be achieved between a robust assessment and one that candidates will not just tolerate, but enjoy.
An assessment should be viewed like any other consumer product. With AI transforming the candidate experience, assessments in the hiring process simply have to keep up. If an assessment is boring, tedious, hard to complete, difficult to understand, or feels irrelevant, candidates won’t “buy” it just like they won’t buy a poorly designed app or even a bland beverage. The same standards now apply. As a result, engaging visuals and an interesting set of items are now a must-have, along with an easy-to-understand interface. Also important: getting the necessary data without demanding a lot of time from candidates. Today’s job seekers won’t tolerate being asked to commit considerable time to an assessment, and that tolerance is falling over time as the bar is raised for every other part of the candidate journey.
There are other practical issues to consider for candidates. How many steps are involved to access the assessment? Can the assessment be integrated into your applicant tracking system (ATS) to provide a seamless experience for the candidate? And how much candidate attrition does this step produce? An assessment vendor should be able to tell you the drop-off rate when the assessment is used as part of the application process.
How easy is the assessment to use?
Ask about the implementation process. Will the vendor help you to train your hiring managers to properly read and interpret results? If hiring managers don’t understand the product and/or don’t see the value, they won’t use it. Relatedly, how intuitive and easy to use are the candidate’s results?
Finally, ask if the assessment can be leveraged beyond the hiring process. Are there engagement or learning and development tools that can help you develop new hires? Can managers access materials to help them form and lead great teams?
Is this “a” solution or “our” solution?
Another factor to consider is whether an assessment includes customization. Does the product represent a one-size-fits-all approach, or is it customized client by client? The best approach involves peeling back the curtain to really understand an organization’s jobs, and then generating a job profile that serves as a unique set of scoring criteria. Further, top solutions are dynamic, changing according to candidate outcomes and the hands-on study of the vendor’s own data team.
The takeaway.
When you think of the word “assessment,” you might first think “test”. But that limits how you should be thinking about this part of candidate selection. Well-designed assessments are a way to understand each candidate as an individual. They speed up the process of getting to know a job seeker, with insights into what roles are the best for them. Simply put, they bring both more efficiency and more humanity into the hiring process.
It’s hard to deny it. The status quo in the typical hiring process has plenty of room for improvement. Ghosting candidates, requiring extensive information early on that could’ve been postponed for later, choosing new hires based on when they happened to apply, leaving closed or about-to-close requisitions on job boards…it’s a lengthy list of troubling practices for many organizations.
It comes down to this: no, you don’t need to be collecting a candidate’s mailing address or the day of the month when they left their three-jobs-ago job. You do need to communicate that you care about who that person is, recognizing that they’re not just another name in a database. That’s what an assessment made with real candidates in mind can do.
