In the 21st century, consultants will earn their way helping businesses like yours improve business outcomes by developing strategies that optimize talent performance.
American Incite TM earns its way helping businesses optimize talent management strategies to achieve better business outcomes.
Talent Assessment is a Strategic Function ...What are your options?
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We offer this guide to help you weigh the essential considerations in identifying assessment options; evaluating their risks, reliability, and rewards.
First qualify your objectives. Determine if the tool will meet your purpose, and your goals. The basic levels of screening and assessment boil down to administrative evaluation. Qualifying competency and skills are the next level. Finally advanced psychometric assessment attempts to help determine the potential for success in a hire.
1. Conventional administrative tools used for employment evaluation include basic job applications, resumes, interviews, and references techniques. While each has value in the hiring process they are subjective in nature offering little more than an administrative convenience in candidate evaluation and selection. None are predictive; they don’t insure success in hiring top performers.
2. Qualifications and Competency evaluation tools offer employers a way of investigating personal backgrounds, reviewing professional experience and evaluating job related competency. The two basic area of evaluation are:
i. Employability assessments are the first level for qualifying and quantifying an initial hire. They’re used in pre-employment screening of basic qualifications including integrity, reliability, job suitability, and verifying education, driving records, criminal background, and for drug use, etc.
ii. Skills assessments evaluate a candidate’s competency and ability to perform a particular job; testing basic communication and math abilities. More sophisticated skills tests measure advanced abilities particularly in computer related fields such as software programming.
3. Modern predictive employment analysis attempts to go beyond general qualifications and skills competency assessment offering screening tools that measure psychological traits in order to predict higher level fit. Psychometric assessments screen for personality, behavioral characteristics, or innate core “wiring” of an individual. These tools purport to offer an objective assessment that can measure performance and predict the ability of a person to succeed in a specific job.
Risk, Reliability, & Reward Considerations
It’s been said that context is everything, so consider the following insights and suggestions in your search of employment screening solutions. First ask if the assessment was designed for job related use and certified to meet legal standards and EEOC requirements. Next ask for documentation that the instrument has been critically reviewed, validated, and certified by an independent third party. Be sure that it does what it was intended to do. Finally, ask for business performance metrics. While an assessment may pass legal review and meet, often narrow, validation criteria, does it demonstrate the ability give you a return on your investment. If it can’t demonstrate proven ROI...find something that will.
1. Legal review: Confirm it meets objective legal and regulatory standards. Was the assessment purposely designed and developed for business applications? The history of assessment tools range from IQ tests of the 1950’s to clinically oriented psychology instruments used between the 1960’s and 1980’s including psychological inventory tests like the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI). Many came under fire with respect to their legality in application. Basic arguments suggested they were discriminatory and/or violated the civil rights of individuals or protected groups. Successful challenges to the U.S. Supreme Court and monitoring by federal and state EEOC entities have made it clear employment tests must be specific to legitimate employment requirements.
2. Reliability considerations: Evaluate test reliability to insure the application or instrument yields metrics that quantify what you are trying to evaluate. Caveat Emptor, vendors claim their instruments are impartial and unbiased; but there is risk, so proceed carefully with due diligence in reviewing the nearly limitless choices in the market. Because common measures of reliability come from statistical analysis of psychometric data it’s essential to look at what’s being measured like sample size and study population and who did the research and analysis:
i. Reliability can be determined by reviewing test-retest process and results.
ii. Validation is just as important. Find out whether the research and validation processes where conducted by a reputable, impartial, and independent third-party consultant or academic institution.
Like snake-oil peddlers of another era offering suspect remedies many assessment vendors invent myriad uncorroborated or assailable claims that don’t stand up to close scrutiny. Even reputable doctors in earlier times where limited in sophistication by comparison to the technology available today. Your due diligence will help you avoid the consequences of financial, ethical and legal minefields you’ll encounter in your review.
3. Business Outcomes: Ask vendors for hard evidence that their assessment has a demonstrated track record in providing a return on investment, improving business operations, and positively impacting financial outcomes. Evidence is mounting that most personality and behavioral assessment tools cannot demonstrate objective measurable business results. While there are many reasons most of these instruments don’t measure up; the basic challenge is what they measure, personality and behavior, are not static; these traits can change depending on circumstances, and over time. The only truly reliable assessment is one that can measure something that is innate and unchanging; not affected by outside influences such as mood, circumstances, or suggestion.
Good assessments produce measurable business outcomes for companies using them. Any vendor you consider should be able to produce a track record of client’s results that clearly demonstrate a return on investment and improved business outcomes. Case Studies and Longitudinal Performance Review are common methods of providing data and measuring results. Employee productivity can be assessed by measuring before and after quality and quantity of work of individuals; and by evaluating the increase in the number of Top Performers. Business unit performance can be evaluated from metrics taken right from the business balance sheets. Investments in any business optimization tools should be able to demonstrate productivity increases of employees and the business. No exceptions.
While legal risks stymied early employment profiling techniques, specialized employment pre-selection assessments offering to predict employee suitability and performance have evolved. Assessment companies have grown in their popularity and scope with estimates suggesting there are over 4000 on the market purporting to help employers make better hiring and placement decisions. Also, assessments range from simple to complex. More complex products generally require more support, which can drive up costs and impact usability. One final but important point about usability is that assessments are frequently abused by ill informed personnel who all too often don’t understand the limits of instruments they are using. It’s essential to advise job candidates and employees about the specific purpose and limitations of any assessments, and how they fit into the hiring and talent alignment puzzle of the enterprise. Bottom line, every assessment should be evaluated on the basis of results that provide meaning and value in their purpose, legality, reliability, and business outcomes that produce a return on the investment.
State-of-the-art
American Incite TM is on a mission to help businesses understand and assimilate human capital management strategies that incorporate state-of-the-art talent assessment technology.
In 1997 an extensive research study by Gallup revealed that a person’s innate “wiring” has a profound effect upon a person’s predisposition for success in a particular job. This is important because unlike personality and behavior traits that can be modified, this Core Nature, was observed by Abraham Maslow, Peter Drucker and others to be unique and unchanging. Until recently there has been no assessment that could qualify, quantify, or map that innate core “wiring” of an individual to the performance of the job for which they are being considered.
Dr. Mashburn, in speaking about current trends in optimizing human capital assessment technology says “Everyone is trying to figure out how you work best....the things they are trying to learn more about are the same things we have been focusing on for the past 100 years: talents, skills, competencies, capabilities, behaviors, psychological and emotional maturity, interests, passions, and so on.” He goes on to say “we have all been asking the wrong questions...most organizations haven’t figured out that people are also born predisposed and motivated to perform certain tasks, and to make certain kinds of contributions.”
Only in recent years has there been a way to consistently and reliably identify “core wiring” these unique personal capacities, this intrinsic nature that gives meaning to work. This new technology has been proven to consistently recognize the unique operating capacities and makeup referred to as “Core Values” that offer measurable insight into the degree of flow people experience while engaged in performing their tasks. Dr. Mashburn has discovered only one assessment that builds a “reliable correlation and measurable connection” between a person’s innate Core Values capacities (relative energy and strategies) that align the tasks of a specific job an employee is asked to perform; or as Dr. Mashburn puts it: “Core capacities invested through right tasks = optimum contribution.”
American Incite TM offers clients the first assessment technology to look at employees in the context of the specific tasks of a specific job (the responsibilities and work they are being asked to perform on a daily basis) in a specific organization, aligned to their unique core wiring! This seminal technology is in fact an insightful task capacity matching system that changes the approach to hiring and job alignment by measuring “who people are” rather than “what people are”. It changes the way companies search for people and the way people look for jobs.
As a leader, what matters to you is performance. As a consultant what matters to us is delivering on that expectation. The strategic talent model we use employs a revolutionary technology developed in the fires of over 400 business turnaround projects. The underlying science increases the number of Top Performer yielding dramatic business outcomes that have:
- Reduced turn-over, often by half;
- Savings in total costs of hiring upto70%;
- Expanding the number of Top Performers from 20% to 80%;
- Improved sales by factors of two, three, even four times;
- Profit increases of 75% to as much as 2100% and;
- Increased total business performance by 30%, with 20% to 30% fewer people.
We do this by preventing the hiring of 85-90% of the people you would normally hire and aligning the right people to jobs they were meant to do and love doing.
Let us show you this proven method for replacing unpredictable recruiting practices with structured, repeatable processes that produce consistent, predictable results by preventing the hiring of 85-90% of the people you would normally.
