What You Need To Know About Talent Assessments

Eliminating guesswork from a hiring process

The stakes in hiring are high. Get it wrong, and the costs can be significant—not just in financial terms, but also in the long-term impact to customers and colleagues. Get it right, though, and the rewards can be huge; research shows the best hires bring 91 percent more value than other employees.

But how can you determine who will be successful (and who won’t) before you make a hiring decision? The usual process involves making those decisions based on job experience and education (in other words, a resume) and an in-person interview. But decades of research has shown that this process delivers a very low success rate, mostly because it’s based largely on human beings’ gut reactions. 

Research shows us that most interviewers make up their mind about a candidate within the first 15 seconds, and then spend the rest of the interview unconsciously seeking corroboration for their view. 

If they make the “right” decision, that’s a lucky break for the organization - but if they get it wrong, then the entire organization suffers. A bad hire can eventually impact the entire organization; resulting in recruitment issues, a lack of resilience, poor engagement and a loss of morale, as well as high turnover. That, in turn, can impair business performance, as costly turnover and a lack of trust in leadership start to drag everyone down.

So, how can you address these issues? Talent assessments and/or leadership assessments can take the guesswork out of the hiring process by focusing on the skills and experience needed for success in a given role, and then allowing HR professionals and hiring managers to gather, analyze and make predictions based on objective insights, enabling more sound, data-driven hiring decisions. 

Even among reputable assessment providers, some assessments are better suited to the job than others — it all depends on what you’re trying to solve for in different situations. The most widely-used psychometric test in the world is the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). While that’s a great tool for personal development and team-building purposes, it has not been designed to make hiring decisions based on its results, especially when it comes to hiring for leadership roles.

Of course, just as it’s not advisable to make hires solely on “gut instinct,” it’s also not wise to make hires based only on the results of a hiring assessment. By combining the two approaches, organizations can ensure they’re making a sound, data-informed hiring decision. When your instinct agrees with the assessment you can proceed confidently. When there is a mismatch it is time to dig a little further to understand why.

So, what should you be using, and how can it help you hire great leaders? An assessment solution needs a few key things to be successful.

It should be flexible, to take into account the seniority level, responsibilities, necessary skills and experience. At the individual contributor level, a candidate’s hard skills are much more important, and much more industry and role specific than at more senior levels. Although some personal organization and teamwork capabilities are important in all roles, they get more critical as seniority increases. As you ascend the management ladder, through team leaders and department heads to the executive suite and, finally, to CEO, the specific hard skills become less important while skills such as planning and strategic thinking and general underlying characteristics such as resilience and drive grow in importance. 

A key thing to look for with a leadership assessment is the range of characteristics that are being assessed. Leadership is complex and a six-minute adjective checklist is not going to give you enough information to support a successful hiring decision.

The characteristics that really matter for a leader include things like critical thinking and reasoning skills; how well a candidate deals with complexity; how quickly they learn; how competitive they are; what motivates them; how they approach risk; and how they deal with conflict. Leaders also should be agile; able to quickly iterate and pivot to meet changing circumstances, and they should be skilled at collaboration not just with members of their own team, but cross-functionally, too.

The characteristics you’re looking for will largely be determined by your organization’s unique needs, your strategy, your existing personnel and culture, the leadership structure, market, industry - there are many different factors. A good assessment solution will be able to provide a roadmap of a candidate’s soft skills and capabilities and provide you with information on how they’ll fit into your organization. The report should also integrate multiple assessments including data on their personality, cognitive ability, critical reasoning, management style and motivations, along with interview guides and professional development roadmaps. 

It’s also important that an assessment solution be easy to use. Your best option will be one that incorporates technology-enabled administration and analysis via artificial intelligence while still being intuitive so that anyone in the organization can use it. 

Finally, any assessment solution must ensure that organizations can use it to overcome unconscious bias, eliminate discrimination based on gender, race, ethnicity or culture and widen their talent pools to become more diverse.

The world continues to become a more volatile, unpredictable, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) place. Organizations need leaders at all levels who can guide their teams through this ever-changing landscape. To be a successful leader in a VUCA world requires a wide range of skills and characteristics that are very difficult to measure other than with a scientifically devised assessment: flexibility and adaptability, ability to cope with ambiguity and uncertainty, resilience and a growth mindset. A proven assessment tool combined with human resources professionals’ and hiring managers’ “gut instinct” can guide the organization toward a more finely-tuned hiring process and better outcomes.