Pre-hire or post-hire, assessments are an ideal tool for identifying high-potential employees for your company.
Assessments help you to eliminate the ‘hiring of friends and relatives’ or even just hiring people because you like them.
Assessments can be used to measure a great many things – from personality types (DISC, TrueColors, MBTI, etc) to performance predictors and tactical skill testing.
The key is understanding the relationship between those qualities (personality, IQ, reasoning, motivation, values, tactical skills) and the team you’re trying to build and/or the individual you’re hiring for a specific roe.
Before you start you want to know the benchmarks for the attributes of your most successful team members, and then use that data to determine the essential qualities and benchmarks you want to see in your new hire.
Consistency is key. Inconsistent selection criteria will directly result in inconsistent talent evaluation, and isn’t that the whole point of using assessments – to have all hiring managers on the right page using a pre-determined and consistent hiring process.
Define the criteria.
Profile your top performers from different departments to identify the characteristics and competencies you want in your prospective hires or for a special team you’re building. What are the acceptable ranges in score for each of these qualities? What if anything would be exceptions to this?
Stop Hiring Friends and Family.
When business owners and hiring managers base their judgment on personal perceptions, you’re on a very slippery slope. The downside of this is that there will be inconsistent performance benchmarks because they are already clouded by leadership’s personal perceptions. What about the perceptions of co-workers and others in the company who sense the inequality?
Avoid the slippery slope of the “buddy system,” to avoid animosity and keep your team feeling that they are being treated fairly with no special preferences based on personality. Assessments help you to depersonalize the hiring process and this will be perceived as fairness in hiring. This can also be especially useful when looking for a way to get out of hiring family or friends. Simply stating that we have a stringent hiring process that all job applicants must adhere to will deter a lot of the wannabe’s looking for a free ride.
Always be Grooming
Just like you must always be recruiting, you must also always be grooming. Grooming your high potential employees will ensure you will always have the high performers you need to grow a successful business. Assessments help you to distinguish between the high achievers and the high performers.
Still Skeptical?
Savvy employers have been using these tools since, as my mother would say, Hector was a pup. There is a wealth of experience out there that is based over 100 years of psychometric science and practical business application to bank on.
At Ashton & Associates we have skilled consultants in our alliance partnership team for any of your psychometric testing or assessment needs.
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This post has been approved for public release by Barbara Ashton. All certified posts carry this Google Authorship link to Google.
Barbara Ashton is the President and Founder of Ashton & Associates Recruiting.
Ashton & Associates Recruiting … Helping you hire right. Every time.
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