Hindsight In Advance

#assessments #eqfit #hindsight Jun 05, 2023

I get so many questions about pre-hire assessments. That may be because I have been using and providing them for 35+ years.

Here are two statements that stand out about the value of pre-hire assessments:

"Pre-hire assessments are the same information that you would learn about someone if you worked with them for a year, you just get to know that before you hire them."

"It's like getting hindsight in advance."

Both of those statements are true. While we will never be able to know everything about someone before we hire them (or after for that matter), we can gain valuable insights through validated and proven assessment tools.

Defining pre-hire assessments

What do I mean by validated and proven assessments for hiring and selecting talent?

Here are things they are not:

Using one assessment only
Using some free assessment you can get off the Internet
Thinking a personality or strengths based assessment is going to tell you everything you need (personality is not a primary predictor of success)

Some may call me a purist about assessments. I think the better term would be realist. Having used psychometric tools for such a long time and with thousands of people, I have learned what they can truly measure and what their limits are. When I create a pre-hire (or developmental) assessment package for an organization, I start with understanding what they want to measure and how that will impact their people, teams, culture, and organization. So instead of starting with a pre-determined assessment and trying to make it work, I start with what insights need to be gained to make the best decisions. The goal is to make the best people decisions possible.

Story

I was sitting with a group of leaders recently discussing what I do and the assessments I use. There were a lot of questions about how assessments can add value to the hiring process. One of the leaders is a long time client. When the other leaders learned this, they asked him about his experience. As you can guess, I was interested in how he would respond. What he said was not what I expected...it was even better! He said, "the one time we did not use Steve's assessments, it came back to bite us, hard!" How can you get a better testimonial than that?!

This is usually the time I express a disclaimer:

You have to ensure that pre-hire assessments are legal and within all hiring regulations in your geographic area. Having said that, there are VERY few places in the world where they are not. It is reasonably easy to search the Internet for this information, or contact someone like me who can help you with this.
If you are adding pre-hire assessments to your hiring process, ensure that they are role appropriate and that you use them consistently going forward.
Never make an employment decision based on only one factor. The best practice hiring processes include resume qualification, interviews (multiple), and assessments.

What are good pre-hire assessments

Think of how you would go about making important decisions. What types of information would you need. The same applies to pre-hire assessments. A good pre-hire assessment package:

Uses only validated and proven assessments
Has a minimum of two assessments
Measures at least personality and EQ (emotional intelligence)
Can be customized for the role, the culture, the needs of the team or organization
Can be used for onboarding, coaching, and development if the candidate gets hired

This may seem overwhelming. It is not. There are people like me who can walk you through the assessment landscape and help you create real value and ROI through your hiring process.

I have a term I use, hire for the right FIT. It means don't hire to just a good fit, hire to the right fit. For more on this, I have a YouTube playlist that explains how to hire right: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLpLzOWm7IcPRjhjxZ6JFyd3CFmuO1P9Yd

What can you learn from pre-hire assessments

Have you noticed that people are getting better at creating resumes and interviewing? I have. I have done thousands of candidate interviews in my lifetime. As good as my interview skills are, I still rely on assessments to "get behind the mask", and get better insights into candidates.

What can you learn in pre-hire assessments?

Their preferred work style and communication style
Their leadership competencies
Their fit to the culture
How their brain processes information
Their probable behavior patterns in the workplace
Their level of soft skills (thinking, decision making, interpersonal communications, professionalism, leadership, relationship building)
Competency in selected hard skills
How they "show up" to influence others
What motivates and demotivates them
Their self-awareness, self-management, and self-direction

If you knew this about a candidate before you hired them, how helpful would this be to making your best hiring decisions? Probably a lot. Most people, including HR professionals, do not know what is possible with assessments. Most of the major corporations use some form of pre-hire assessment, that should tell us something.

Pre-hire assessment value and ROI

I know turnover is a sore subject for many organizations. Back to my story, one of the leaders asked, "Who in this room has made a bad hire in the last 12 months?" Can you guess how many raised their hands? Every single leader indicated that this has happened to them in the past 12 months. The cost of turnover has been calculated to be from 30-200% of the annual compensation for the role where someone was hired and it did not work out. This does not take into account the "opportunity cost". What opportunities were lost due to a bad hire? Enough of dwelling on the negatives.

The right pre-hire assessment package brings the following value and ROI:

Reduced turnover and related costs
More rapid on-boarding
Reaching productivity more quickly
Better integration into the team and organization
Enhanced profitability
Greater predictability of success
The ability to create a success pathway for the new hire

These are just a few of the positives.