We help employers take a more objective approach to selecting staff, reducing the costs of hiring. The starting point is to identify the characteristics that distinguish low from high performers, then tailor assessment procedures to measure those characteristics. The key methods are psychometric tests, interviews and assessment centres.

Psychometric Tests

The types of test we use are:
Ability tests e.g. verbal, numerical or abstract reasoning, or critical thinking. These measure "intellectual horsepower". Ability tests tend to be the single measure most closely correlated with job performance.
Personality tests These measure thinking style (as opposed to intelligence), how the candidate relates to people, and personal characteristics such as conscientiousness and emotional stability.
Situational judgement. These are designed to measure more explicit job-related skills. They are less abstract and have greater 'face' validity.
Role-specific tests. For example we offer a test that specifically measures sales competencies.
Motivation and values. We offer tests that measure what a candidate thinks is important to them, what motivates them, whether it is achievement, money, competitiveness, social contact etc.
Quick sifts. For screening of large volumes of candidates we can develop quick online tests to screen out unsuitable candidates. These can be based on a range of factors including ability, social skills, dependability, safety consciousness etc.

Interviews

A more formal approach to interviewing is based on gathering evidence about key criteria that are important to the job, in order to make fair comparisons between candidates. This entails having a well thought-out job specification, as a benchmark. Broadly we can carry out three types of interview:
Competence-based interviews. Candidates are asked to provide evidence of how well they have performed in the past on competencies important to the role.
Behaviour-based interviews. Candidates are asked to say what they would do in certain scenarios.
In-depth interviews. The interviewer uses the results of psychometric tests to explore in more depth the candidate's strengths and weaknesses.

Assessment Centres

In an assessment center a group of candidates are assessed as a group. It may include:
group exercises.
individual exercises (e.g. an in-tray task to measure time-management and judgement skills).
being asked to produce a presentation.
psychometric tests.
Assessment centres can be demanding and tend to measure the ability to work in a team, social confidence / persuasion / influencing / leadership, resilience and the ability to perform under pressure.

Example

Take a company that uses a less than ideal assessment method (such as unstructured interviews) and rates candidates according to this method. They categorise each according to whether they would have obtained a sufficiently high score to be hired. They hire all the candidates anyway. Six months later they measure how well the candidates have actually performed in the role (e.g. by using a manager's assessment), and categorise them as to whether they would have wanted to hire them in hindsight.


Typically the following result would be obtained.
The top right quadrant shows candidates who were rated highly in the assessment process and performed well in practice i.e. "hits" - where the selection process worked well.
The bottom left quadrant shows those who scored poorly in the assessment and also performed poorly in the job i.e. "correct rejections".
The top right quadrant shows the candidates who would have been rejected as they scored poorly in assessment yet performed well in practice i.e. "misses" or "the ones that got away".
The bottom right quadrant shows those who scored well in assessment yet performed poorly in practice i.e. "false positives".

The benefits of superior assessment practices

A more objective approach to recritment aims to increase the correlation between assessment and eventual performance in the job. The better the method, the more the results approach a straight line.

Greater accuracy means fewer high performers are missed, and fewer low performers are hired. The overall benefit to an organisation can be considerable.

The cost of a single hiring mistake can be around 100% of the candidate's annual salary (i.e. recruitment agency commission; the internal cost of assessment itself; loss of productivity whilst the candidate beds into their new job; six months salary before they are assessed and a decision is made to let them go; and redundancy costs).