As a practitioner of ability and personality assessments, I’ve noticed a major push towards integrating psychometric tools into recruitment processes. Not only is this improving efficiency, but it also benefits the overall talent management process too. Evidence suggests that standardised cognitive ability, skills and personality tests are significant indicators of job performance and cultural fit. Although every organisation has bespoke requirements, there are a variety of measures available that are both reliable and valid.
Psychometric tools are used for a variety of different reasons:
Recruiting and Selecting Candidates
First of all, when used correctly, psychometric assessments allow employers to assess individual differences (i.e., ability, soft skills or personality) in potential candidates and current employees. While these assessments are often administered online, particularly with high volumes of applicants, the capability to hold supervised assessment sessions also exists. Therefore, this facilitates the option for a client representative to educate candidates of future expansion plans and strategies. Moreover, they can increase candidate buy-in and ensure the particular candidate is the person completing the assessments.
Identifying and Developing Leaders
Assessment solutions can also be used to identify talent for internal promotions. Particularly, by measuring performance, potential, readiness, and fit. Therefore, organisations can achieve better staff planning with greater confidence.
If you do decide to use these tools within your organisation, it is vital to understand the benefits of doing so. Knowing exactly what advantages you are gaining from the use psychometric tools is absolutely crucial.
Benefits of using assessments
1. Identify Best-Fit Candidates
1 in 5 new hires are regretted decisions and 1 in 3 new hires regret joining an organisation and plan to leave. These negative stats can be nulled by using tools to identify better-fit candidates. Not only does using assessments in the selection process offer insights into a role, but also allows candidates to decide whether or not it is for them. Additionally, they can see whether they would fit into the culture of the organisation. As well as that, Hiring Managers are also presented with an array of information on the candidate so as to determine their ability, soft skills and overall cultural fit.
2. Save Time and Costs
Similarly, identifying the right cultural fit eliminates the risk of a bad hire and the costs associated with this. Hiring Managers can reduce the number of poor-fit candidates even before the interview process. Thus resulting in a reduced time-to-hire and optimised candidate shortlist. Assessment solutions also create the chance to identify a future candidate pool. This is done by building a database of candidates who may not be a fit for the current role, but may have potential when a more suitable role opens at a later date. This again helps companies to save both time and costs.
3. Reliable & Objective Recruitment and Selection
Assessments provide data and insights to help make informed decisions and select the best talent. By using assessments directly related to the tasks performed in a job, it is important to ensure validity in your processes. Unconscious bias is one of the primary bases for legal cases in employment decisions. However, incorporating an objective framework around candidate selection ensures a fair and standardised process is in place so decisions can be made free from bias, minimising the risk of legal action.
4. Improving the Candidate Experience
Above all, it can be said that having a structured selection process heightens new employees’ engagement and overall performance. Candidates are generally impressed with a process that gives them an opportunity to demonstrate their abilities, attitudes and preferred work style in a fair and objective manner. This will always have a positive impact on the employment proposition and employer branding. Most importantly, upon completion of assessments, candidates have the opportunity to request feedback on their performance. This ensures candidates get something in return regardless of whether they’ve been successful in the role or not. This can especially have a tremendous impact on the recruitment experience and again, employer branding.
Sooner rather than later, psychometric tools will become the norm in the recruitment and selection process. Organisations using them will have the upper hand over their competitors due to identifying talent for their teams. Especially in today’s candidate-driven market, you need every advantage you can get!
