Shopping for a Pre-Employment Test? Five Things to Consider, pt. 2

The next in a series of questions to ask about any solution you’re considering for pre-employment testing at your company…

2. What does the tool measure?

Before you can come to any meaningful understanding about how effective a particular solution will be for your company, you have to be clear about your needs. Different assessments are designed to measure different things. Going into your due diligence knowing all the specifics about your requirements makes it easier to avoid an expensive false start with the wrong vendor.

For starters, spend some time considering corporate and departmental goals and how those goals can be supported by the positions you’ll be filling. What does this analysis tell you about what you need to test for?

Also consider the personalities, behaviors and skills necessary for these jobs. What characteristics, experience or habits need to be isolated? What’s your company’s culture? What behaviors, assumptions, values and norms are common to the company? Are people rewarded for innovating or for following directions? Are they inclined to introversion or extraversion? With this information in place, you can start to build a complete inventory of what your company needs to measure.

You’ll want to ask for copies of vendors’ technical manuals and determine what their tool is designed to do. Also find out what it measures against. The best tools compare candidates to the high performers in your workforce rather than to normative data, which takes society as a whole.

Once you’ve established your high performer benchmarks, a behavioral assessment should draw the appropriate questions to point to behaviors that fit with this benchmark profile. It should draw those questions from a large sample of data, ideally a bank of hundreds of thousands of professionals and workers.

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