Best Practices for Assessment Selection

Companies are starting to depend on assessments to help acquire, develop, and promote the best talent.  Assessment instruments are one of the best tools to support your hiring and selection processes, people development initiatives including succession planning,  and helping to define you high potential candidate or future leader.

The challenges facing companies today include employee turnover, lack of employee engagement in the work environment, recruiting the right person for the right job, and retaining the future stars of tomorrow.   These are the major issues that affect the bottom line of any company today.

Most companies understand the various costs involved when a bad hire occurs.  It is estimated today that the cost of replacing a high achiever in any company is between three and four times the individual’s annual salary.  Your company’s investment spent on recruiting, development and retention can be a significant portion of your budget. 

Cost savings and outcomes more than justify the cost of an effective assessment process.  Here is how that assessment process can make it happen:

Hiring For Attitude

Everything in the business journals points to a dramatic shortage of talent in the workplace today.  I can’t tell you how many articles on “hiring for attitude” I have read in the past three months.  If all of this is true, then I know one thing for sure.  Companies must change their approach when it comes to the selection of new hires.

Recruiting today is much more difficult than it has been in the past.  Finding qualified people for certain job roles is becoming a real art.  It is certainly a fact of life that our management talent pool is shrinking and that experience or specialization is in great demand.  Experience or technical proficiency has become a commodity and the hiring focus has shifted toward attitude. And this shift has precipitated tactical changes in how job selection is being conducted.  It is important that you focus on your talent management processes before it is too late.

Here are some suggestions for recruiting and selection improvement:

1.       It is important that you use the most talented employees in your company  to help with the recruiting process.  You can use them to create a benchmark or hiring profile that is truly representative of what you need in your workplace to be highly successful. 

2.       Use a well defined Behavioral Interviewing Process that includes a scorecard based on the people that achieve at a high level in that particular position and what accounts for high achievement.