Vendors have touted the advantages of pre-hire cultural and behavioral assessments for years, and their results have shown significant savings due to productivity increases and turnover decreases.
What is new is the growing use of pre-employment assessments as a front-line step in the recruiting process. More and more, organizations are using assessments to filter out candidates before recruiters even get a chance to look at their resumes or qualifications for a particular job.
Reasons for this new trend include the overwhelming influx of resumes from jobs posted on the Internet; technological advances that make it easy to link assessments to the application process; more comfort with, and better science underlying, such assessments; and the increased need for softer skills, such as customer-service abilities, in employees at all levels of an organization.
Using assessments as a front-line defense against a blitz of applicants is not a new idea, says David Pfenninger, CEO of Performance Assessment Network (pan), in Carmel, IN. They were commonplace many years ago in steel mills and manufacturing plants, he says. "Some companies are clearly reverting to that mind set. We have clearly seen an upsurge in testing volume in the advent of the Internet age."
The assessment upswing is also being caused by other factors, says Carl Greenberg, vice president of selection and retention for Spherion in Fort Lauderdale, FL, including greater comfort with the use of such testing due to the research in the late 1980s and 1990s that refined and improved the science.
This research concluded that, to be successful, assessments need to link personality characteristics to specific job behaviors, rather than overall job performance. The research also pinpointed five major personality factors (commonly referred to as the "Big 5") related to job performance: agreeableness, conscientiousness, extroversion, emotionality and openness.
To sample today's online self assessments, go to: www.SelfAssessmentCenter.com
Source: Human Resource Executive, December 2005