Predict Performance, Improve Efficiency With Assessments for Selection

What if talent managers could hire or promote someone and predict whether or not the individual would work out?

Michael Blair said it’s possible. Blair is strategic staffing leader for CenturyLink in Overland, Kan., which operates in 33 states and employs some 20,000 people. He said in his experience that those who do well on personality assessments tend to outperform those who don’t.

Blair goes further: Within customer service and sales, he said he’s documented that those who assess well generate more sales revenue and have less turnover. Tying assessment outcomes to potential interviews means hiring managers can do two interviews instead of five, which means across 10 hires, they can save 15 hours for other purposes.

“By using the assessment tools, we can help the business make better hiring decisions, improve performance and improve business outcome measures,” Blair said.

This is the result of using high-quality assessments that are backed by research, closely tied to job requirements and done in conjunction with personal interviews and reference checking.

Don’t Cut Corners Now
It’s likely that cutbacks mean there is less talent in many organizations right now. At the same time, recovery has begun, and there are thousands of would-be applicants looming on the horizon, motivated in part by months of unemployment. Couple that with a continuing need to cut costs, and personality assessment tests might well be one of the first things to go.

Those in the trenches likely will say that would be a mistake.

“We have found that if we ignore [personality assessments], we ignore them to our peril,” said Meredith Patterson, director of human resources of for Logical Choice Technologies.

Using assessments as part of a process to choose finalists can mean that fewer candidates need to be interviewed, which translates into more time for talent managers to devote to higher-value activities, such as employee relations and rolling out policy changes within the organization.

Companies that use personality assessments as part of a well-planned and -implemented selection process can readily demonstrate their value and the value of HR as a whole to an organization’s bottom line.
 
“We have hired, despite the results of the assessment, and it has always come back to bite us,” Patterson said. “We religiously follow it because it has been successful.”
    
Michael Spremulli, founder of The Chrysalis Corp. and a corporate personality profiler, said he has had large clients use thousands of personality assessments a year for labor-intensive positions, and smaller ones use a combination of assessment tools to identify higher-level positions.

Given that assessments have been validated by experience on the ground and proven by a century of scientific research, there shouldn’t be a question of the usefulness of this particular tool. Spremulli said it is critical to look at the research for the specific tool an organization is considering.

What Could Go Wrong?
There are still those who doubt assessments’ usefulness, especially in an economy where talent leaders are looking for places to cut expenses.

“‘What’s the point? Anybody can fake them.’ We hear people ask that question,” said test designer Robert Hogan, president of Hogan Assessment Systems.

Hogan said well-designed personality tests are quite difficult to fake. Such instruments are as good at screening out fakes as they are at illuminating the personality traits needed for a job.

Hogan described a “faking profile” that well-designed tests can generate to ensure no one games the system. “When you’re doing a whole personality profile, they may be able to fake a whole scale [a single aspect of the measurement], but they won't fake a whole profile.”

Ken Lahti, vice president of strategy and content for PreVisor, said the easiest questions to fake are those that require a response ranging from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree” or those that ask for a ranking on a scale from 1 to 5.

Tests that use forced choices, or those that involve the tester issuing a warning about faking, tend to show less faking. Lahti also said faking can be minimized through the use of computer-adaptive testing, which automatically refines questions based on responses.

The nature of good assessment instruments is to extract a set of scientifically objective metrics that filter out most efforts to game the system. Anyone who has taken a personality test will relate to the seemingly repetitious questions. That’s part of the filtering process, but there is a good deal more built into assessments that can assure an organization receives accurate and reliable information.

Lahti said the key to good assessment instruments is the word “good.” It’s best to ask first what kind of research is backing them up.
 
“There are good tests and bad tests out there and good and bad uses of them,” Lahti said. “You can have a test that measures pretty well, [say] an entry-level customer service test, which may be effective for predicting performance and retention in those roles, but it might not be a good test for measuring leadership potential or predicting success in a director-level or manager-level role.”

Get the Most From Assessments
Spremulli said that it’s most important to use an assessment that has one or more validity indexes built in. A validity index is a scale that assesses how candid and honest a person is when he or she responds to the assessment, thus revealing whether he or she is attempting to manipulate the outcome.

“Every test you use needs to be reliable and needs to be valid,” said Spremulli.

Reliability means the test yields consistent results over time, while validity means the test actually measures what it claims to measure.

The best ways to achieve accountability in establishing an assessment process include:

• Make certain that all jobs have personality requirements. Set high accountability as one key requirement.
• Monitor the process. Though it may be convenient to have applicants take online tests at home, this can invite outright cheating.
• Use two tests. The chances of successfully deceiving two tests are considerably slimmer than those of deceiving one.
• Tell participants they will be discussing their answers at a later date.
• Conduct personal interviews at least partially based on the test results to reveal discomfort, hesitation or inconsistencies.

Lahti said to choose a test focused on the skills required by the job at hand, and then use it in a consistent, objective manner. Remember, too, that it won’t be enough.

“These are great tools, but you never want to use just these tools,” Lahti said. “Use personality tests with structured interviews and with ability and aptitude tests, with measures of skills and experience, and certainly with measures of past performance as you have those available.”

Logical Choice Technologies uses a three-part test for selection. The first part assesses an individual's personality and cognitive skills. The second tests how an individual is likely to react in a given situation. The third determines what motivates an individual. Managers then use a comparison between the results of all three tests and the requirements of a particular job to make hiring decisions.

Spremulli also said that it’s best to look not only at personality, but at a measure of cognitive abilities. Otherwise, personality assessments may not serve any useful purpose.

“You have to run some type of cognitive measure,” Spremulli said. “How do you measure a person’s horsepower mentally? You may have a perfect personality and everything is in place — everything’s ideal, but [you] may be dumber than a bag of rocks. It is not just one factor; it’s the whole person. That’s how we operate.”

The assessment outcome is then carefully matched with the job.

“If the assessment is way off, then it is a deal breaker,” Patterson said.

Someone who is going to be an independent salesman working out of his home 3,000 miles away from the office likely will have a much different assessment than someone who will be working in the finance department, for example.

Assessments Improve Efficiency
Both Patterson and CenturyLink’s Blair also see assessments as a way of cutting down on the number of resumes that must be reviewed, for different reasons.

Patterson said many applicants faced with an assessment will opt not to pursue an application any further. Blair said in a large company, which will often get 500 applications for a single position, tying an assessment to a position and using research to identify the top 30 percent reduces that number to 150 potential candidates, making it a more manageable group.

Blair said assessments are useful after the hire, when comparing later job performance to how an employee scored on a personality assessment for a given position. Successful employees who scored high and do well on the job mean that talent managers can predict similar success for those who score similarly in the future.

“One thing we try to do here is rather than talk about someone who performed better or didn’t, or who stayed with the company longer or didn’t, we turn it into a dollar figure,” Blair said. “Those who do better mean better revenue and longevity as well, and we don’t have to retrain them.”

He acknowledged that large companies like his — that make more than 2,500 hires a year — often have their own in-house data to use. But there is enough similarity in jobs, such as retail sales, that talent managers can pull data from a variety of companies, organizations and industries to predict what kinds of personality attributes they need to look for.

Given the current state of assessment instruments, their demonstrated accuracy and their ability to help predict performance, talent managers are wise to continue to apply them in hiring. A disciplined process supported by scientifically valid instruments is time consuming and expensive, but the alternative is far more costly.