Making Sense of Assessments

The investment spent on recruiting, developing, and retaining employees represents a significant portion of an organization’s budget. The direct and indirect costs of a bad hire or promotion are well known. Multiple studies have shown the cost of a bad hire to be as much as three to four times the individual’s annual salary. Additionally, as Gallup® and others have documented, too many employees just don’t perform at expected levels, are not fully engaged, or unnecessarily choose to move to other companies.

In light of this business challenge, it is no wonder there has been a strong trend in the increased use of assessments to acquire, develop, and promote the best talent. However, with this trend has come significant confusion about how to choose assessments and how to best use them to obtain a competitive advantage. Making sense of assessments can be a challenge.

When choosing and using assessments to attract, develop, promote, and retain talent... the most effective and defensible is a behavioral assessment.

A good assessment to use in the workplace should:

• identify and attract top talent;
• reduce the amount of time required for recruitment;
• predict job success much more accurately than using only interviews;
• reduce training costs;
• identify and develop behavioral competencies and core values;
• identify management behaviors that develop and retain talent;
• identify best placement for succession planning;
• protect you from lawsuits; and
• facilitate effective teamwork.

When evaluating assessments, there are six key questions that must be considered.

1. Is the assessment work focused and presented in a manner that builds the confidence of applicants and employees?
2. Does the assessment produce results that relate to job performance for the specific jobs?
3. Does the assessment produce an overall score enabling recruiters and line managers to make consistent and accurate employment decisions?
4. Does the assessment process measure all the important factors related to success for the job?
5. Is the assessment legal and ethical?
6. Is the assessment valid and predictive?

Dan Harrison took all these factors into consideration and developed a job success behavioral assessment that offers a suite of solutions that meets this criteria. A simple 30 minute digital questionnaire results in approximately 635,000 data points.

The Harrison Assessment has been painstakingly constructed using several psychological methodologies that prevent deception, reveal whether behavioral tendencies are actually strengths or derailers (aka Paradox Technology™), and measure both eligibility (education, experience, and skills) and suitability (job related behavior).

As a result, employers who use our assessment receive a rich set of accurate and reliable Decision Analytics that focus on crucial success and engagement factors for any given job. These Decision Analytics support and accelerate decisions throughout the entire talent management life cycle - from recruiting and hiring... to performance management... to learning and development... to leadership development and succession planning... to team building.