What are the best practices for conducting talent assessments and ensuring reliability?

Most companies loose sight of what they're looking for by believing assessment tools will drive successful outcomes. We've found that companies need to look at multiple factors to drive successful hires by looking at candidates values, personality and culture alignment. Not just at a company level but also a team and hiring/task manager level. This doesn't mean assessments need to be onerous, the best assessment is meeting someone and there is a fine balance when it comes to tools between helping to facilitate decisions versus creating friction in the candidate experience.

Even before choosing an assessment, it's critical to discover, evaluate, or confirm the job's requirements. An assessment will only be successful if you've picked the right things to measure. I-O psychologists call the process of systematically discovering a job's activities and skill or ability requirements job analysis. Traditional job analyses can take time and cost resources, but even a confirmatory approach -- verifying the qualifications listed on a job description or a brief calibration interview with a job expert -- can go a long way towards ensuring an assessment measures the most critical competencies.

For interview responses, I've found it helpful to create a behaviorally anchored rating for an answer that 'meets expectations.' For teams or companies strapped for time and expertise, this more specific definition of what a 'passing' response includes often helps calibrate interview evaluations across time and interviewers.

If you're assessing soft skills, technical skills, domain experience or psychometrics it's also important to understand the "why". It is validation of skills or alignment of that candidate to your business?

A pilot study with job incumbents can generate the data you need to evaluate an assessment psychometrically, assuming you have a large enough sample size. But gathering enough trial responses can be difficult in practice and only offer anecdotal feedback. If purchasing an off-the-shelf assessment, ask for technical documentation and previous results from psychometric quality checks. It's a red flag if a vendor fails to provide this documentation written by professionals trained in psychometrics. Previous documentation won't offer the same benefits of a local study of an assessment's quality, but it can indicate that you have a high chance of success.

One major area companies forget is evaluating and monitoring the process when it comes to assessments. Many times, I have joined a company that have implemented assessments, and, after evaluation we find out these assessments are not properly complimenting the process, due to not establishing clear cut criteria, either by their coding assessments or personality assessments. The "why" is never asked, why are we using these assessments, what are getting out of these evaluating candidates, and how does this add to our process? Until all of these questions are answered, you cannot properly implement the correct assessment.

Ultimately there is nothing better than human interaction to validate whether a candidate is a good fit for your business and to likewise allow a candidate to find the same alignment. A 360 view of a candidate should be a balance of validation and verification, where assessment tools help to verify information such as technical skills, experience or traits. Assessment tools can help create that view but the interpretation of results may also introduce inherent bias. I'd certainly encourage hiring managers to use assessment tools to verify candidates meet the minimum requirements and help shortlist, but not be a major consideration in hiring.

It's important to remember that the question isn't "Should we use an assessment in our hiring process?" but "How are we using assessments in our hiring process?" The Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures, published by the US government to help enforce equal employment opportunity laws, specify that a selection procedure is anything used to help make employment decisions. This casts a wide net over most hiring practices, subjecting them to the same standards typically considered when purchasing or building an 'assessment.' That said, applying the steps listed previously to any of your hiring practices is essential to ensure they are both legally compliant and effective.

The use of assessment tools in hiring does have many valid use cases however the challenge is to consider what outcomes you are driving, is it filtering out, verifying a profile or ensuring they will succeed in your culture? Ultimately as hiring manager there are 2 major considerations: - What type of experience am I driving for candidates? And - What problem am I solving that can't be resolved by meeting someone? Hiring is a human based transaction and most companies forget it's a sales process and it's unlikely a candidate has heard of your company prior to applying, it might be the first interaction they've ever had with your brand. Experience driven hiring.

Start from the start - define the requirements for the role, and go from there. Once you've decided what you want in a candidate, then you can start to think about how to best measure that during the hiring process. Likely that will come down to: - Measuring the skills with a skills assessment - Measuring more subjective 'softer' things via interview(s) When it comes to the skills assessments, it's best to make sure they are: - Not too long, which might deter the candidates - Configured for the role with relevant questions - From a trusted source with high quality, peer-reviewed questions - Set-up to prevent or minimise cheating my design While you can create your own assessments, it will be very time-intensive and unscalable.