State of the Industry Research: Research Report Summary: The State of Pre-hire Assessments

The art of finding and hiring quality candidates

Recruiting and selecting talented people is a top HR priority for HR, and with the low talent pool, many are leveraging assessment tools and processes to find, hire and select the best candidates.

To better understand both the use and value of modern assessments, HR. com and HireVue, an HR software company, launched The State of Assessments survey. The survey ran in September and October of 2017.

Here are the top 11 findings from the survey:

1. Finding Enough Qualified Candidates is a Major Challenge

Majority (About four-fifths - 79%) of respondents said that “finding enough qualified candidates” is very difficult. Many also cite other challenges such as moving candidates through the recruiting process within an acceptable timeline.

These two challenges are related. It does no good for an employer to find qualified people if it takes too long to bring those people aboard. After all, in today’s labor market, a qualified candidate may well slip through the organization’s proverbial fingers and wind up with a faster-moving competitor.

2. Most Organizations Use Candidate or Employee Assessments

Most (76%) companies use some sort of assessment, with the most common usage being the recruitment for professional positions and to select executive candidates.

A majority use assessments in the selection of external candidates for open positions. Although some indicated that they use assessments for purposes of internal mobility, respondents rated this application lower than for recruitment and selection purposes.

Respondents from larger sized entities (i.e., more than 1,000 employees) were somewhat more likely than average to use assessments in general (88% versus the 76% average) and pre-hire assessments in particular.

3. Pre-Hire Assessments Systems Enable to Hire Quality Candidates

Ninety percent of respondents said their assessment tools enable them to hire quality employees. However, only 66% agreed that their assessment process allows them to predict a new employee’s future performance.

There are also administrative benefits in using a pre-hire assessment tool. Most see such tools as a way to manage the volume of potential candidates as well as to reduce administrative and management time associated with the recruitment, selection, and hiring of candidates. In short, organizations want both quality and efficiency from their assessment tools.

4. Users Seek Accuracy and Ease-of-Use

Seventy two percent of respondents cited accuracy as the most desired feature in an assessment tool. Over half also selected analytical reporting capabilities and ease-of-use for job candidates. Others said that the tool should also have good analytical and reporting capabilities.

Respondents from larger organizations most value assessment tools with the “ability to be used on multiple platforms, including mobile devices,” which makes sense given the complexity of multiple locations, diverse roles, and typically higher investments in technology. This highlights the fact that organizations will demand different features based on the unique needs of their businesses.

5. Competency Analysis and Reporting Function; Core Features Users Need

In this type of analysis, the competencies of a candidate are compared to those required of the role. It is a core need of organizations using assessments. But specific competency analyses are not enough in themselves.

Nearly as important is the reporting function of the assessment tool, which provides not just a summary but an interpretation of assessment results. In short, this feature helps users make sense of the data and it helps them explain the results to others.

6. Psychometrics and Work Simulations Features are also Key

Psychometrics and work simulations have been incorporated into the pre-hiring process by about a third of the respondents who use pre-hiring assessment tools.

But this fraction goes up substantially when we focus on companies that strongly that agree that pre-hire process enables them to hire quality employees. About half of them use psychometrics (53%) and work simulations (48%). In contrast, only 30% of others use psychometrics and just 26% use work simulations.

7. Artificial Intelligence; Not a Popular Feature Yet

Relatively few respondents say their pre-hire assessments currently include artificial intelligence.

We should note, however, that some of today’s top vendors incorporate artificial intelligence to improve and otherwise generate features such as competency-based assessment summaries that are grounded psychometrics.

8. Relatively Few Organizations Have High Completion Rates

Only about a quarter of respondents (27%) believe that most of their candidates complete the assessment, whereas 33% said that half or less of their candidates complete their assessments.

There are, of course, many possible reasons candidates quit their assessments part way through. In some cases, they may lose patience or just run out of time. In other cases, the assessment may convince them that they are not a good skills fit for the job, or the types of questions may suggest to them that they do not wish to work in the kind of corporate culture that they believe the tool reflects.

9. Getting Right Candidates to Complete the Entire Process is a Major Challenge

Nearly half of respondents (46%) reported that “getting the right candidates to complete the entire process” is a major challenge for them.

Our analysis showed that companies that strongly that agree that pre-hire process enables them to hire quality employees were considerably more likely than others to say that a larger percentage of candidates complete assessments. Although we cannot assume causation here, the data is suggestive that there may be a benefit—in terms of finding quality candidates—associated with higher completion rates.

10. Gamification and Psychometrics Might Improve Completion Rates?

Among organizations that have close to 100% high completion rates, 16% use gamification to a high or very high degree, compared to 11% for all firms. Whereas 37% of all organizations use psychometrics to a high or very high degree, the same was true for 48% of those with high completion rates.

Thirty nine percent of organizations (compared to the average of 27%) that use gamification to a high or very high degree said that close to 100% of their candidates complete their assessments.

Correlation is not the same as causation, of course, so we should not assume these features of assessment improve completion rates, but these data do support the possibility.

11. Not New Users, but Existing Users to Make Further Investments

One might guess that the organizations likely to invest in pre-hire assessments in the next year would be those that have invested little in the past. However, just the opposite is true.

Organizations that already believe that their pre-hire assessment process enables them to hire quality candidates were most likely to invest in such assessments in the next 12 months. Why?

Perhaps because these organizations have the greatest appreciation of the value and potential return on pre-hire assessment investments. Similarly, organizations with existing systems are more likely to make investments than those without existing systems.

Conclusion

Organizations that makes good hiring decisions tend to have higher productivity and lower turnover. This can have a positive effect on their bottom line too. This is why finding and hiring quality candidates is a top priority for human resources today and technology such as pre-hire assessments can help HR to make better decisions during the hiring process.