I blogged a little about this topic and my plans on it before, but I found some other good resources,and did some more thinking. Apologies if you read the previous post and find this one to be much the same. Hopefully you at least find the info to be useful. Pre-Employment Assessments are a big thing in the world of HR at the moment. There's a very helpful article from ere.net that gives some good guidelines on how to use these types of programs and ensure success.
One of my goals for my current organization is to implement a pre-hire assessment program. Our present hiring system is out of date, relying upon frontline managers with little training to perform basic interviews. We invest a fair amount of time and money on training, and have a moderately high turnover rate, so anything that increases retention is a plus. Our frontline managers are likely going to continue to have the deciding voice in the hiring process, so step one was to try to add to their abilities to make these kinds of decisions.
To that end, I developed a recruitment and selection manual, and will implement it along with some training sessions to get our managers better prepared for the hiring process. The recruitment and selection manual focuses on the hiring process in very general terms, covering topics such as red flags on resumes, where to look for viable candidates, and how to conduct structured interviews. It also contains guidelines on labour law and discrimination, and is intended as a desk reference for our managers.
I don't know yet whether I will actually be able to implement a pre-hire assessment, but I have outlined a plan to do so.
The pre-hire assessment, ideally, would come before the interview process. All applicants would be directed to the company website, and invited to complete these assessments as a part of their application. Once completed, those scoring above our set limits would be encouraged to forward their resumes on to the appropriate person and proceed from there.
However, our very first step before implementing any kind of assessment has to be to determine what kind of traits we are looking for. Validity is tremendously important in this process; we need to know what we want, and we need to know it will work.
This is where we get back to my undergraduate days in anthropology. Time to study. First of all, we will identify a list of high performers, and a list of average performers. We won't bother with the low performers. Then, we study the high performers, in order to try and determine just what it is that they do differently from the average ones. This will involve shadowing high performers to observe them, and interviewing them to see what they think makes their performance superior. We will also study the average performers, and generate a list of differences based on what we find.
Next, we will generate a survey based on our findings, and it will be sent out to the company as a whole. We won't be able to shadow every single high and average performer company-wide, but we can certainly get everyone to fill out a survey based on our preliminary results, and the results of that can be used to generate a list of traits and behaviours unique to our high performers.
Once we have that list, we're going to separate out behaviours and traits that are teachable from those that are personality-based. This will then be used to further develop our new employee training program. It gives us a basis to ensure that every new employee has some training in how to be a better performer. Those results that are personality-based will be used as a basis for the type of assessments that we use.
The biggest trick will be separating correlation and causation, and that's going to take time and data. It presents a real challenge, but the good news is, I can piggyback on other people's research, because there's lots of it out there. Hopefully once I have some data to gather, I can really dig into it and find something interesting.
I would love to say what kind of assessment I would use, and certainly I have my own ideas of what makes a high performer do better on the job. However, the point of studying the matter is to ensure valid results. We are not our competitors; copying the pre-hire assessments that they use will not necessarily give us the results that we're looking for, and so it is critical that we establish our own profiles first. The point is to get a good ROI, and we need valid results that are genuinely predictive of success first.
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