By Dan Harrison, Ph.D.
If you use a suitability assessment, there are several important factors which make the assessment useful. These include:
The ability of the assessment to measure different aspect of suitability – If only personality is measured, there will be significant gaps in the suitability information.
The ability of the assessment to measure at least 100 traits – Since behavioral assessments are general only about 25% of the traits will relate to success for a specific job. Therefore more traits need to be measured to obtain a sufficient number of traits that promote or obstruct success for the specific job.
A questionnaire that is work focused – Otherwise the results will not be as relevant to the workplace and there may be legal risks related to justifying how your assessment is related to the job requirements.
The ability to detect false answers and to pierce self-deception – Otherwise, the results are not reliable.
Performance research that is used to create job success formulas for specific jobs – Otherwise, you are just guessing at the behavioral factors that relate to success.
Reports that are job specific, numerically quantified and easy to understand – Otherwise, the results are randomly interpreted.
The ability to weight and integrate the eligibility score and suitability scores – Otherwise, there is no effective means to achieve an overall assessment.
For more detailed information on this subject, please see the supporting document entitled “Best Practices in Assessing Job Suitability”.
Pre-Assessment
By using a comprehensive suitability assessment and a comprehensive eligibility assessment, you can effectively pre-assess applicants. This can save you a great deal of time and trouble by enabling you to deal with only the best applicants. It also enables you to interview fewer people because you don’t need to spend your valuable time interviewing anyone other than the best candidates. Depending upon the number of applicants, this can reduce your recruitment workload by up to 80%.
Assessing Suitability at the Interview
Using a comprehensive suitability assessment in combination with the interview is the most effective means of assessing suitability. A suitability assessment given before the interview provides and effective means of double checking what you are seeing at the interview and focusing on specific areas that could be a problem. This provides insight that is most likely to not appear using only an interview to assess suitability. Consequently, it provides an effective means of dealing with applicants that are often highly prepared for the interview. Job boards are now bombarding applicants with information about how best to hide their weaknesses and exaggerate the strengths. Some behavioral assessments such as Harrison Assessments not only reveal the real candidate, but they also provide behavioral interviewing questions and scoring suggestions that help you to gain further insight into the person’s job behavior during the interview. If you feel more comfortable evaluating suitability during the interview you can give a higher weighting to the suitability evaluation from the interview and consequently minimizing the impact of the other formal suitability assessment. Harrison Assessments also allows you to score the important suitability factors and have that score integrate with all the other scores of eligibility and/or suitability.
However, if you decide not to use a separate suitability assessment, it will be best to structure behavioral interviewing questions beforehand. You could learn behavioral interviewing skills that will improve the result. If you are using the Harrison Assessment system, you can easily enter your own behavioral competencies and create a scoring system that will integrate with all the other assessment factors in order to obtain an overall assessment.
© 2008. Harrison Assessments Int’l 6
