Spotlight Online for College Employment and Recruiting Professionals, January 20, 2010

Organizations recruit and hire college graduates based not on what they have accomplished as professionals, but on assessing potential and predicting whether or not the candidate has the knowledge, skills, abilities, and more to be a successful fit.  

“The best way to make these predictions is to base them on relevant data,” says Charles Handler, president and founder of Rocket-Hire.com, a pre-employment testing and assessment consultancy. “Assessment is a way that an employer can get a bigger, broader sketch of the student’s ability.” 

While the trend several years ago was toward greater use of assessment as part of the college hiring process, the economy has had an impact on employer use of assessments, Handler says. These days, fewer companies are hiring and therefore, there is less assessment being conducted. If companies are hiring and didn’t have an assessment program in place before the downturn, they most likely haven’t added it because they’re not spending money on new programs. On the other hand, Handler has anecdotal information that suggests that those organizations that had been using assessment before the economy dropped continue to do so.  

“The interesting thing is that when the economy’s bad and there are a lot of job seekers, there’s never a better time to use assessment because there will be many more applicants for openings,” Handler says.

“Assessment provides employers with an efficient way to evaluate [candidates] and serves as a filter for a large volume of applicants. Also, assessment allows employers to be more selective.” 

He points out that when there are more applicants for open positions, employers have the luxury of choosing the very best people.  

“Assessment helps them do this because it helps identify the best hires using the parameters the organization set,” Handler says. “In fact, using assessment is safer because, when money is tight and there’s not much fat in the budget, a hiring mistake is much more damaging than when times are good.”  

But before employers conduct an assessment of job candidates, they need to conduct a proper job analysis. During these analyses, employers break down jobs to identify the competencies, skills, experience, abilities, and more that are required for an employee to do the job effectively.  

“Conducting a job analysis is the foundation of any good candidate assessment,” Handler says. “If an employer does not do a job analysis, it’s really minimizing the potential impact the assessment can make.”  

A job analysis also allows the employer to work backwards and determine the common ‘derailers’ of a position. Then, the employer can determine the profile of people who do and don’t fit the demands of the position.  

“They are able to look at it from both ends of the spectrum before they even begin selecting assessments for that job,” he says.  

Handler says many companies don’t spend enough time understanding and building assessment as a process within their hiring. Just as it’s important to do a job analysis, he says, it’s critical to choose the assessments that provide the desired measures. 

“A general assessment may be somewhat helpful, but it won’t provide an employer with the specific information it needs to make decisions,” he says. “A piece of it is understanding what the assessment provides and how much value it has in identifying potential high-performing applicants. Employers should strive to get a 360-degree snapshot of an applicant, and one test won’t provide that.” 

On the other end, Handler recommends that employers evaluate their assessments’ effectiveness. This is particularly applicable to larger employers with big assessment campaigns.  

“It’s important that they conduct some ROI studies or validation to understand what the assessment is providing,” he explains. “When measuring retention, turnover is a good example. It’s easy to measure and you can look at how peoples’ scores on a hiring assessment relate to their propensity to turn over. It can help an employer to understand that hiring people over a certain score level will help to minimize turnover.” 

In terms of trends in assessment, Handler says there are two things happening that aren’t necessarily compatible with one another.  

“I think there will be increased scrutiny from the OFCCP on assessment and hiring programs,” he says. “Companies need to be prepared for this and document what they’re doing and follow best practices by doing things such as job analysis and validation.” 

He also sees assessment vendors making it much more usable by developing software and building systems that make it easier to configure assessment, and analyze and report results with more flexibility. 

“That’s great and I believe more employers should be using assessments, but it’s important for organizations to understand that just because they’re using a technology-aided system, it doesn’t mean they’re not accountable for meeting best practices and doing the types of things that EEOC and OFCCP would want to see when they look at the employers’ systems,” Handler warns. “Companies need to have their own internal system to ensure that whatever system they adopt will be compliant.” 

Handler says that while assessment can be incredibly valuable, it’s not foolproof.  

“It’s impossible to accurately predict human behavior all the time,” he says. “Assuming an assessment is going to help make outstanding hires 100 percent of the time or even 75 percent of the time is a stretch. Employers need to understand that it’s one piece of a broader picture they should be looking at.”