Assessments — Making the Hiring Process Effective
If your hiring process relies primarily on interviews and reference checks, you are choosing to use a process that is significantly less effective than it could be if more effective measures were incorporated. However, adding just two assessment tools to the hiring process - a reliable and valid cognitive ability test and a reliable and valid personality test - significantly improve the effectiveness and predictability of a hiring process.
A cognitive assessment evaluates an individual’s intelligence. It assesses the
ability to reason, solve problems, comprehend ideas, and learn quickly. In
contrast, a personality assessment contributes to understanding how
employees behave in work situations and their natural behavioural tendencies.
Cognitive ability is relevant to work performance even when job specifics vary. In other words, while skill requirements vary greatly among different jobs, cognitive ability contributes to success in many fields, especially for jobs with complex responsibilities. This is because people with greater cognitive ability tend to learn new tasks more quickly and absorb new information more readily.
When used with a personality assessment, a cognitive assessment helps assure hiring decisions that are in the best interest of the organization and the selection of individuals with the greatest chance of success.
Here are five ways a combination of cognitive ability assessment and personality assessment can benefit your hiring process:
1. Together, they help avoid bad hiring decisions, which can be extremely
costly. The Harvard Business Review reports that as much as 80 per cent of
staff turnover is attributed to poor hiring decisions.
2. They help substitute for insufficient and often incorrect or exaggerated
information gleaned from references, résumés, CVs and interviews.
Assessments provide more objective and comprehensive information.
3. As already mentioned, a cognitive assessment evaluates a new hire’s
capacity to reason, solve problems, comprehend ideas and learn quickly.
These are critical skills for successful job performance.
4. They can be administered in a mere 15 or 20 minutes or so and thus make a significant contribution to evaluating applicant suitability to the job without slowing down the selection and hiring process.
5. Finally, they have natural advantages in terms of ease of use and low administration costs. Many applicants can be tested simultaneously in groups, and the tests can be scored rapidly.
PerspectAI is a powerful game-based assessment tool for data-driven talent decisions. The tool provides a holistic approach to understanding Cognition and Personality, one that organizations need to make unbiased talent decisions.
To know more on how you can bring an in-depth data-driven assessment to your talent management processes, click here.
Assessments for Work is a 3-part series written by Dr Puranjaya Singh, Chief Strategy Officer at PerspectAI. The series takes a deep dive into how assessments can help organizations make better talent decisions.
