Predicting performance through behavioral skills
If the last two years have assured us of anything, it is that behavioral skills are the bedrock for an individual's professional growth. Increasingly, companies are focussing on finding ways to measure these skills and help develop them among their employees.
However, you’ll be surprised to know just how many employers confuse personality traits with behavioral skills. Inherently, behavioural skills develop and change in a shorter period of time, as opposed to personality traits which are more fixed and stagnant because the cycle of change for personality traits is much longer. Behavioral skills are considered crucial for not only surviving the future of work, but thriving in it. Why, though?
There are so many companies that hire people on the back of competencies which are essentially the ‘what’ of things. Are you able to sell or not, for instance. But behind every ‘what’ there is a ‘how’. So, for those competencies to manifest, there are essential skills required. Skills like persuasion, influencing people, being empathetic and that becomes the ‘how’ for the ‘what’.
If you really want people who stick and for them to be good at their jobs, it’s important that they’re not just following an SOP, but also understanding what really goes on behind, into making sure that they are successful at certain jobs and competencies and build upon those to ensure that they are ready for the future of work.
Keeping that in mind, the common word among employers and recruiters is that these skills like the ability to communicate, being persuasive, empathetic or influencing people, are skills that they pick up from interviews and whether or not people have prior experience in doing customer-facing roles, for example. Companies, thus, often think of these skills as intangible skills which are very hard to measure.
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So, how do you measure these skills?
One of the most common problems with this approach is that interviews aren’t standardized and you don’t know the changes in conditions for different candidates and recruiters. Most researchers believe that the only way to tackle that is to have assessments and tools that are consistent across participants who take it under similar conditions. In psychometrics, this is thought of as a reliability measure.
However, once this process is standardized, how does one actually measure these skills which are thought of as intangible. The key solution is to try and establish predictive validity which is hard to do. But, what does this imply?
As anyone who might be concerned about the scientific merits of an assessment, while measuring a behavioral skill you want to show that it predicts something real about the person. For example, a person scores high on a communication skills assessment and tends to be a better communicator in real life situations. It is this predictive power that one needs to rely on while trying to measure behavioral skills.