The Value of Testing Job Candidates

When I first broke into publishing—a longer time ago than I want to remember—I was tested. My prospective employer wanted to see a couple of things about me as I applied for a role editing Spanish translations of books for Hispanics. First, could I write and edit in both languages? So I wrote a sample in English about the wonders of flossing your teeth and then translated it into Spanish. I also was asked to review the publisher’s existing Spanish-language books to evaluate their quality. I was able to identify a number of problems—and more importantly, was able to offer concrete solutions to fix them.

And the testing continued as I moved to other roles in publishing. After all, prospective employers didn’t know me and wanted to see what I could do. After my first publishing job, I was a little cocky—my books had sold more than 1.1 million copies in five years, numbers that other publishers never even remotely approached—so I bristled a bit about the testing. But I did it, passed and kept going.

Separating Proof from the Pudding
However, I also understood the value of it. Over the years, I’ve had to evaluate prospective translators, writers, editors and designers—and testing has been invaluable. Resumes only tell a very small, highly manipulated part of the story. Anyone can say they did anything and line up friends to attest that they are awesome. What I’ve found is that testing rapidly shreds claims on resumes, and that those who look the best on paper often turn out to be the worst—also on paper.

I’ve seen editors with big name companies on their resumes who struggled to catch mistakes in three 100-word blurbs. I’ve seen designers with pretty portfolios give up after an hour because it turns out that they lied about their ability to work in InDesign. I’ve seen translators with an impressive client roster bungle basic phrases, ignore specs and demonstrate an astounding weakness in basic Spanish-language grammar. To give you a more direct sense of what I mean: I tested more than 500 translators and copy editors to translate my books for Hispanics—and only 3 made the cut. This was not because I was unconscionably tough—it was because the mistakes of prospective translators leapt out at me from the page, starting with the first sentence.

You've Lived It
The reality is that candidates are often not who they say they are. We all know this, yet how many times have you had a boss come in to take over an area and run that part of the business into the ground? How many highly touted sales VPs have you seen come in and produce next to nothing—while getting promoted? How many marketers have you seen come into a position and have no plan, no ideas and no clue? And of course, I could swap out job titles in the previous rhetorical questions and cover a lot of fields where these frustrating, soul-draining conditions apply.

Skipping Future Focus in Favor of Past and Present
And in fact, when I moved on from editorial to marketing, one thing that struck me was the lack of testing. During the interview process, no one ever asked me for a sample plan. I received plenty of general questions, including those nonsensical questions about my biggest weakness or where I saw myself in five years. But after dozens of interviews at different points in my career in the area of marketing, no prospective employer has simply laid out the goals and resources and asked me for a sample plan. I’m astounded by this. The value of a marketer is not just what they claim to have done before—it’s what they can do for you going forward. How can you possibly get a sense of what a marketer can do without some sample ideas? Still, the focus is always on the past and present rather than the future.

These days, as a consultant I don’t give away free samples—I charge for marketing plans. But I will carefully look at a prospective client’s goals and offer some general comments about the direction I would take so that they understand that I understand them and what they need.

Showing Skills to be Shown the Money
However, when you are an employer and are considering paying salary, 6.2% in social security and Medicare taxes, insurance, 401K and other benefits, it makes sense for your finalists to show you what they can do, whether it’s marketing, coding, sales or just about anything. A marketer should be able to generate a sample plan, a coder should be able to fix bugs you introduce into lines of code and a salesperson should be able to offer some new ideas, prospects and approaches that are tailored to your needs as a company. I especially think this is crucial for leadership positions. Make candidates sign an NDA and then show you what they have in mind for your company.

It’s not about getting something for nothing—the publisher who asked me to write about flossing never published that material. It’s about getting a direct, objective sense of what someone can actually do.

Maybe this is crazy or quixotic of me to expect. After all, we all know that in the real world, most jobs come from relationships and that ability often doesn’t factor into the equation. However, I’d think that more often than not, companies don’t have a need to employ somebody’s moronic cousin or a golfing buddy who happens to be a very congenial, attractive guy or gal. I have to think that most of the time, what a company needs is someone to step in there and get it done, regardless of connections or affability.

If so, why not test them? Skip those silly psychobabble tests that are supposedly designed to weed out potential ax murderers or weirdos. The interview process will be more illuminating than a dozen psych tests, which in my view tend to prove the gullibility of companies more than the value of such tests.

Forget that. Test your candidates’ abilities. That’s what ultimately counts.

Abel Delgado works with clients to help improve their marketing ROI in a variety of areas, with content being a specialty. In previous roles he’s driven leads for B2B firms, won business with pitches, spiked web traffic, SEO efforts and social media followership.  
Before that, he edited more than 50 translations of books for the Hispanic market, launched a blog on Latam media called Latin Link and directed content development for hospital systems, hotels, tourism entities, electronic components distributors, pharmaceutical firms and other types of companies.