10 Reasons to use behavioural assessments
8 Feb 2017Around 80% of Fortune 500 companies and over 80% of companies in Australia utilise psychometric profiling in recruitment. We’ve put together ten reasons why everyone should use Psychometric Assessments!
(1) You’ll reduce hiring mistakes
The recruitment process is costly and making a hiring mistake can prove to be even more costly. Preventing just one wrong hire could save your organisation thousands of dollars. In fact, the cost of a mishire is set to be around 20% of that employee’s annual salary, which equates to approximately $8,000 for a personal care worker!Assessments can help you avoid to hire someone who performs well in an interview environment but nowhere else.(2) You’ll be able to understand the whole person
People are more than just the snapshot you’ll get of them during an interview and HR experts will tell you that a person’s resume isn’t always as it seems. It’s important to look at the bigger picture. A resume only tells you about a person’s work history, education and maybe their hobbies, but it won’t tell you if this person has the right values and attitude for the job. With so many new (and unexperienced) entrants coming into the sector, hiring people with the right values and behaviours over experience is more important than ever before. You may have heard the saying: people are often hired for what they know, but fired for who they are…
(3) The results are measurable
Quantifying human behaviour and its associated impact on the bottom line is probably the most difficult challenge facing organisations. Correlating assessment and recruitment results with outcome variables such as core job performance, employee turnover, engagement and commitment is the way for HR departments to transform their image to a business critical function.
(4) You’ll shorten the hiring process
Recruiting the right person, can take months and as we all know, time is money. Online assessment systems give you the ability to pre-screen candidates, speeding up the process, and allowing you to have someone (and not just anyone- the one!) in the job within weeks rather than months.
Some values and behavioural screening methods – like Care Advantage – can be used at the top of the selection funnel. Skip sifting through resumes, instead let your applicants complete two short assessments first. Use the results to then decide which resumes to examine! Instead of reading 100 resumes, you’ll only have to read 20.
(5) You’ll have a more robust recruitment process
Adding psychometric testing to your recruitment process helps create a standardised and robust recruitment process. Hiring managers will come to the interview with a more rounded picture of the applicant knowing better what to ask and which areas to explore further. Adding a testing layer to the process weeds out those applicants who are not really interested in the job anyway, resulting in a reduction of no-shows to interview as a bonus.
(6) You’ll be making informed decisions, not assumptions
Human instinct is little better than rolling dice. Psychometric testing adds a level of standardisation and objectivity to the traditional art of recruitment by helping to remove the unconscious bias that comes along with many selection decisions.
Knowing how effective a certain recruitment method is in predicting the future outcome is called predictive validity where 1 is labelled as “certain”. Now that we know what predictive validity is. looking at the resume alone – work experience and education – has a rating of only 0.2. Adding to that a structured interview increases the predictive validity to 0.5, however adding psychometric assessments and validating interview questions ups this to 0.8!
Psychometric assessments are a more valid method than interviews, academic achievement & reference checks, and when utilised in combination are highly predictive of future job performance.
(7) There is return after selection
Once a selection is made, the psychometric results can be put to further use. By this stage we’ve gained so much knowledge which can directly feed into onboarding and development programmes.
Also knowing who your employees are helps knowing what they want from the company, how to motivate them and how to get them to work towards their strengths.
(8) They guarantee consistency of benchmarks
By using psychometric tests, candidates are all assessed according to the same criteria. This means that they are not judged based on any biases or prejudices, such as race or education. This in turn helps in taking more objective decisions.
As a bonus, Care Advantage has the option to create your own benchmarks so you can compare applicants against your top performers, hiring only those who fit your company’s values and culture best.
(9) You’ll attract better employees
With over 83% of companies in Australia using psychometric testing as part of their hiring process candidates expect any company worth being a part of to use it. So don’t miss out!
Behavioural assessments will improve the credibility of the recruitment process and show candidates that the role, and their part to play in the company, is valued.
(10) You don’t need a psychology degree
Gone are the days of complex reports where a psychologist was needed to interpret psychometric test results. Psychometric test providers are slowly adopting a ‘design first, data second’ principle. Beautifully designed, data rich and easy to read reports can now be instantly accessed online.
Simplified real world language and easy to interpret graphics that tell you exactly what you need to know are becoming the norm. The reports empower every hiring manager to make a well-informed decision.
