Standardized Assessments in the Hiring

¶ … Standardized Assessments in the Hiring Process According to Chad Haywood's June 24, 2009 Fast Company article "How to choose the right assessments for your next hiring project," small and medium-sized businesses are often tempted to cut costs when hiring new employees, and may go with their gut impulse when making a selection of a new employee, rather than using costly, but systematized methods of assessing a potential employee's suitability and abilities.

This is dangerous, says Haywood, as small companies where every member is a critical component of the workplace team are especially sensitive to poor hiring decisions.

Haywood suggests that insufficiently systematized and data-based methods of selecting employees are at the root of many small enterprise's problems: "In the case of hiring decisions, this means not only evaluating candidates' level of knowledge and experience, through the typical resume and interview, but also using the right assessments to objectively assess their ability to perform critical job tasks, their personal habits and work style, and their motivation to invest time and effort into job success" (Haywood 2009).

Many different types of objective, standardized assessments are available for HR, but the company must target what qualities and character traits are critical to success within its specific organization. The Buros Institute of Mental Measurements, publishers of the Mental Measurements Yearbook and Tests in Print series "have reviewed and gathered information on nearly 4,000 commercially available assessment instruments, produced by over 900 publishers" (Haywood 2009). An organization, before embarking up a search for new recruits must define what unique attributes are critical to success at the company.

Are they behavioral, or 'personality-based'? If so, "behavioral style, or personality questionnaires, which help explore individuals' typical approach to people and problems at work, and determines fit and compatibility with the job, team and organization" should be used by HR (Haywood 2009).

If having a high level of motivation is determined to be the key to employee success, then motivational questionnaires can be used to determine if the individual's personality is likely to be influenced by the carrots and sticks provided by the workplace -- for example if the person is internally motivated (by the quest for approval or knowledge) or externally motivated (by material rewards). Similar to workplace motivational questionnaires, interest assessments attempt to highlight what tasks engage the person's attention.

In contrast, "ability tests measure enduring aptitudes that are stable over time," such as trainability in certain skills (computer aptitude, for example) and may be more critical for technical positions (Haywood 2009). Skills and knowledge tests, which evaluate capabilities that can be learned and enhanced through practice, are used to see if the candidate has the necessary technical competency required to perform his or her future duties.

The HR professional must decide if technical expertise and the ability to be trained or more intangible qualities like motivation or character are necessary for success -- a sales position will demand different qualities than an engineer, and thus require different assessment methods. Haywood asserts that the impact of a poor selection of personnel upon the organization as a whole will also determine the number of assessments used, the type of assessments, the detail and the level of verifiability of assessment used.

"For example, selecting your next executive, who will have a great deal of responsibility over the company and its people, is a High Impact hiring decision. In other words, the risks and consequences of a bad hiring decision are severe, which necessitates a greater investment into a quality assessment program. However, hiring someone to clean your warehouse is a relatively Low Impact hiring decision, as the consequences of selecting a poor employee are relatively limited" (Haywood 2009).

Haywood's blithe assertion not only flies in the face of participatory management approaches, but is blatantly unsubstantiated by any evidence in his article. It is possible to argue, for example, that a lower-level technician capable of swiftly fixing an error in a user's Blackberry service is just as, if not more important, than an upper-level manager.

After all, if an executive loses a million-dollar deal because his or her connection is not working and he or she was unable to read his or her mail for hours that individual is likely to reconsider his or her use of that particular type of technology, no matter who is CEO of the company. The person who cleans the rooms at a luxury hotel must be conscientious to maintain the hotel's reputation for quality.

There is a great deal of temptation to believe Haywood's contentions: wouldn't it be nice to be able to find one's employees easily, simply by finding the right test to screen them? However even Haywood must the caveat that assessments must be valid and finding assessments that provide reliable assessments, especially of intangible attributes like motivation and enthusiasm can be challenging. Assessments are inexpensive compared with training programs, but far more reliable but time-consuming methods of assessments are available, especially for the small.