It seems that with spring comes the annual blossoming of assessment use surveys and forecasts. This article highlights a few observations and conclusions from two of the surveys that we found to be particularly interesting.

WHY ORGANIZATONS ARE USING ASSESSMENTS

Over 80% of study participants use assessments in the hiring process. The following graph identifies the top 5 business outcomes or improvements that are sought by companies from the use of pre-hire assessments:

While almost all companies use assessments during the hiring process, only 50% of survey participants use assessments for current workforce management.  Nonetheless, the interest in using assessments for internal human resource management is increasing and particularly for the following applications:

WHAT ASSESSMENTS ORGANIZATIONS ARE USING

The most common types of assessments used by business continue to be personality, skills and cognitive abilities assessments.  New developments in testing such as simulations and bio data analysis are getting a lot of press but seem to be limited in the uptake.

The hiring process used by most organizations also continues to be following the classic steps of resume review, reference checks, prescreening questions, testing, interviews and background investigations. Although 70% + of respondents use or plan to use social media sites for sourcing job applicants, only 20% or so believe such sites are effective tools for determining candidate fit or will have a major impact on how talent is recruited, measured and managed.

ASSESSMENT USAGE BY JOB TYPE

Although assessments are used for virtually all types of jobs, organizations are using assessments more commonly in hiring for the following positions:

• Managerial/supervisor positions at the entry and mid level
• Technical/professional (particularly for knowledge and skills testing)
• Sales
• Customer service
• Administrative

ASSESSMENT EVALUATION BY ORGANIZATIONS

Despite the fact that most organizations (over 70%) pay lip service to proving the return on investment (“ ROI”) or effectiveness of the hiring tools and processes they use, only 50% of organizations actually do anything about it.

Those companies that do evaluate their use of assessments primarily focus on turnover/retention metrics and supervisor ratings to measure the effectiveness. Although companies can measure all of the desired business outcomes or improvements outlined above (as well as training effectiveness, legal compliance and financial metrics like sales revenue per hire), few companies actually do so.

So why is there such a gap between good intentions and practice?  Both the surveys reviewed in this article and our experience at Prevue Assessments suggest the primary cause is the unwillingness of organizations to commit the time and personnel required to gather and analyze data necessary to prove ROI.  Prevue Assessments will be endeavoring to bridge this gap in the future by creating new online data gathering facilities to simplify both the collection and analysis of ROI data to prove the effectiveness of using Prevue products. If you have interest in this subject we would appreciate your observations and suggestions.

The surveys reviewed in this article cover a wide range of subjects beyond those highlighted in this article.  Complete copies of the surveys can be obtained by email request to support@prevueassessments.com.

Bibliography

1. 2009 Rocket-Hire Pre-Employment Assessment usage Survey, Mark C. Healey and Charles A Handler Ph.D.
2. 2010 Global Assessment Trends Report, Sarah S. Fallaw, Ph.D., Andrew L. Solomonson, Ph.D., Previsor Talent Measurement.