How can you find the employees you need and ensure that they not only have the skills that you want, but that they are ethical, honest and have the right attitudes?
One of the easiest, most accurate and least expensive ways is to test them. The right skills assessment can tell you things that you simply cannot discover on your own. They are one of the most powerful tools in one's recruiting arsenal.
However, this wasn’t always the case and some people still think that tests are inaccurate and ineffective.
This certainly isn’t the case today. Here’s why.
Many years ago, there was a case involving an employee who had been tested for a promotion and was found lacking. She objected and took her employer to court. During the trial, her lawyer challenged the validity and reliability of the tests that had been used. Experts witnesses were called and it was shown that although her firm had been using these tests for years and had based countless promotion and hiring decisions on them, the tests were unproven, unrelated to the real world and were, in fact, useless. The court ordered the company to promote the employee and the firm stopped using tests. This case got a lot of attention and it gave the entire testing industry a black eye and because of it, some people believe that tests aren't useful or aren't legal to use.
A few years later, another company put a prospective employee through a series of interviews and then decided not to hire him. He too decided to take the matter to court. But this time, the results were completely different. The prosecutor claimed that the firm had no firm evidence upon which to base their decision. They had spoken with the applicant, but had no idea whether he could do the job or not, nor had they any way to prove that he was unsuitable. The court agreed and ruled that the man must be hired. In addition, the judge admonished the company for not using any tests!
More and more organizations now use pre-screening and other kinds of skills, attitude and aptitude tests to help them assess the quality of their applicants, the readiness of their employees to be promoted and to help improve leadership, management, organizational effectiveness and conduct team building in addition to testing hard skills.
Testing has improved and there are excellent, proven, valid and reliable tests available for almost everything. The best tests measure what they say they are measuring (they are valid) and give consistent results time after time (they are reliable). But what about legality? Obviously, employment laws fluctuate from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, however, there's a general rule of thumb that can be followed. In general, an employer may test or screen for any skill or aptitutde that can be shown to be a requirement for competence and success in any particular position. Therefore, one may screen for customer service skills, MS Office proficiency, managerial skills, retail abilities, honesty, drug avoidance (in the USA, but not in Canada), electrical or other kinds of industrial skills, and much more. And there are 100's and 100's of tests available to help employers do just that.
There are also lots of tests that aren’t worth the paper they are written on. Unless you understand validity, reliability, correlational and validation studies, you need expert advice and should only use tools which meet these standards.
Every HR department should be using assesments whenever possible. Any good assessment should confirm what you believe that you already know about an employee or an applicant (based on the resume, references and your own gut instinct) or redflag and identify things that you either overlooked or which the applicant kept from you.
Many tests also include internal measures that will tell you instantely whether or not the applicant answered the questions 'honestly' in an open and forthright manner or whether they tried to put only their best foot forward and minimize their negative qualities. In other words, there's also the ability to prove that the results are accurate and reliable.
A huge variety of tests are now available on the market.
If you are hiring or promoting, coaching or trying to identify training needs, there are high quality, cost-effective tests available to assess them.
It just makes sense to use a test when one's available.
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David Towler is President of Creative Organizational Design, a firm offering almost 40 years of expertise specializing in employee assessments and which has over 2000 different assessment titles available.
For more information, please contact us at info@creativeorgdesign.com or 519-745-0142.
