When Assessments Don't Work

Sometimes I'll ask an owner or manager about using pre-employment assessments as part of their employee selection process and they'll say something like, we tried that and it didn't work. To be fair, sometimes assessments don't appear to make a difference. Here are some reasons why assessments may not seem to be helping you hire and retain stars as promised:

You're using the wrong assessment. A good consultant - one who is looking to sell solutions, not assessments - is going to look at the roles you are trying to fill, ask relevant questions, discuss alternative assessments that are available, and make recommendations based on your need, not just on what they offer.

Your assessment is not benchmarked. Some consultants give the assessment to your best two or three employees, then blend the results and call that a benchmark. It's really better to benchmark the job, not your people. I prefer a process where we get a group of stakeholders in a room and discuss the success factors of the job, then run a benchmarking assessment against those success factors. This gives much better results than benchmarking incumbents.

The failures of new hires have nothing to do with assessment results. People typically leave jobs in the first six months for one of three reasons - 1) Bad management. The assessment may be identifying ideal candidates, but those candidates are quitting because their supervisor is a jerk, or the company culture is negative. I haven't found an assessment yet that will predict which candidate will prefer working for a bad supervisor. 2) Poor job design. The job itself is no fun and even though we did our best to put lipstick on that pig during the interview process, once the reality of the job sets in, they choose to do something else. 3) Poor pay. There is usually a link between pay and job design. Do you really expect workers to do your job for the same wages they could do some other job that is more interesting and generally more attractive?  

Should you ditch your assessment or the consideration of using an assessment? Unfortunately, the alternative is to base your hiring decisions almost 100% on interviews. Studies show that unstructured interviews are almost a waste of time - you are likely just as well off making job offers based on applications or resumes, sight unseen, than bringing people in for casual, unstructured interviews. Make the interviews more structured by using pre-selected, valid interview questions and the results are slightly better.

Step one is to understand why your workers are leaving and take appropriate action to close the back door. Step two is to add more structure to your interviewing process to increase the validity of your results. Step three is to add one or more benchmarked assessments to your selection process. Invest in these three steps and you'll find that each time you add a new hire to your company, you've upgraded your talent pool.

The Davidson Group can assist with all three of these steps - contact us for more information.