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Originally Posted On: How to Consult Effectively with Employee Assessment Tests – TTISI

 

Utilizing employee assessment tests is a smart call for organizations looking to expand their talent pool, but it can be a challenge to implement them effectively. This guide will share everything you need to know about using employee assessment tests to elevate your hiring process and employee development, but here are the basics for now.

What are behavioral assessment tests?

The first question to answer is “What is an assessment test?” These are questionnaires, usually administered online, that job candidates, current employees, organization leaders and more take to learn something about themselves. This knowledge is then applied to improving the workplace environment in some way.

A useful tip is to eliminate the word “test” from your vocabulary when we’re talking about employee assessments. Behavioral assessments aren’t a pass or fail test; they simply measure and explain behavior.

The mindset throughout your organization should be that assessments are a way to gain insight into the core of your people. They will help you understand the motivations, behaviors, communication styles, skills and emotional intelligence of your employees and potential employees, and those things can’t be fake or cheated in the same way a test can be.

Does using personality assessments for company hiring work?

This is another extremely common question — how does this process actually work?

The answer to this question depends entirely on your process. Will handing a pool of candidates an online assessment weed out unsuitable candidates and find your perfect match, with no further work or steps in the hiring process? No, of course not.

Will utilizing assessments as part of your hiring process and taking the time to learn what those results mean by using a benchmarking process and the help of a trusted coach or consultant support your hiring team in making an educated, informed decision about filling a role? It absolutely will.

Are pre-employment tests predictive of success in a job?

This is the magic question everyone wants an answer to; will employee assessment tests reveal the potential of job candidates?

The answer entirely depends on what exactly you want to know. When using online pre-employment skills testing, you need to be very clear about what aspects of personality and experience you need measured. There’s an assessment for everything, but there’s no ‘one size fits all.’

Your best bet for success here is to implement a benchmarking process. Later sections will explore this concept in-depth, but simply, using a benchmarking means you, along with subject matter experts and a trusted consultant, create the end result of an assessment modeled after the ideal candidate. Then, candidates are measured against this benchmark in the hiring process to see how they stack up.

Can pre-employment personality tests discriminate?

This is an important concern when selecting an HR exam for employment; how will this affect our hiring process, legally and technically?

The good news is that you can find the answer to this question by choosing the right assessment provider. The provider you choose needs to have an adverse impact study, which provides support for a business’ internal review of employment practices, like pre-employment assessments, to ensure that those practices are not disproportionately excluding members of a protected category.

Choose your provider carefully! The right partnership will help your business thrive while the wrong one can get you into trouble.

The important thing to remember is that employee assessment tests aren’t magic. They can’t be failed, and the insights they reveal are based on the employee’s answers and own behavior. DISC, an incredibly popular assessment tool for hiring, is actually an observable language — over time and with the necessary research, one can pick up on and understand each other through the lens of DISC without ever seeing their assessment results.

What is the selection procedure?

Finding out how employee assessment tests fit into your hiring process depends entirely on the way your team wants to utilize them. We break down a sample hiring process later on, but the essential idea is that candidates take an assessment after initial screening and interviews, but before a final interview and decision is made.

Behavioral assessments aren’t screeners, to be distributed en mass to anyone who applies to your open position. They are tools to gain greater insight about an individual’s behavior, beliefs and skills before investing more time and resources in them in the hiring process.

It’s not very often that an assessment will reveal a huge red flag about candidates; the most likely scenario is that employers can look at the insights revealed from an assessment and see if those insights line up with the role and responsibilities of the position they are trying to fill.

What are some good personality tests?

If you’re looking for the right assessment to find the right candidate, you have a lot of options. TTI SI has assessments based on five core sciences, and then combinations of those assessments in the TriMetrix suite.

TriMetrix assessments are incredibly popular in hiring because they give the right amount of information about an individual. Take TriMetrix EQ for example; this assessment combines DISC, 12 Driving Forces, EQ to measure behavior, motivation, and emotional intelligence.

Think about how powerful it is to have that information about an individual before they even walk through the door for an interview. You can start to understand how they will function in a role, how they prefer to solve problems and handle conflict, and even measure that against their future team and see how they will interact together.

Assessments aren’t a magic solution or an easy answer for your hiring process; they are a tool to be thoughtfully utilized to help everyone on your team make better decisions in every interaction. They’ll give you the answers about why and how people operate, but how your hiring team and leadership decide to implement that information will make all the difference.

Employee assessment tests are an extremely valuable tool for your organization’s hiring strategy, day-to-day operations, and employee engagement initiatives. Read on to find out exactly how assessments reveal human potential, how the work of coaches and consultants with organizations releases, and how that potential is then realized in the workplace.