Assessment Strategy
Determine your objectives
Qualify the tool to ensure it will meet your purpose, and your goals. The basic levels of screening and assessment boil down to administrative evaluation. Qualifying competency and skills are the next level. Finally advanced psychometric assessment attempts to help determine the potential for success in a hire.
1. Conventional administrative tools used for employment evaluation include basic job applications, resumes, interviews, and references techniques. While each has value in the hiring process they are subjective in nature offering little more than an administrative convenience in candidate evaluation and selection. None are predictive; they don’t ensure success in hiring top performers.
2. Qualifications and Competency evaluation tools offer employers a way of investigating personal backgrounds, reviewing professional experience and evaluating job related competency. The two basic area of evaluation are:
i. Employability assessments are the first level for qualifying and quantifying an initial hire. They’re used in pre-employment screening of basic qualifications including integrity, reliability, job suitability, and verifying education, driving records, criminal background, and for drug use, etc.
ii. Skills assessments evaluate a candidate’s competency and ability to perform a particular job; testing basic communication and math abilities. More sophisticated skills tests measure advanced abilities particularly in computer related fields such as software programming.
3. Modern predictive employment analysis attempts to go beyond general qualifications and skills competency assessment offering screening tools that measure psychological traits in order to predict higher level fit. Psychometric assessments screen for personality, behavioral characteristics, or innate core “wiring” of an individual. These tools purport to offer an objective assessment that can measure performance and predict the ability of a person to succeed in a specific job.
