In today’s rapidly evolving job market, assessing an individual’s knowledge, abilities and skills accurately is crucial for both employers and employees. In short, assessments mitigate risk, ensure success.

Yet, it is common that many hiring professionals still rely solely on interviews. Perhaps those conducting the interview are skilled and effective interviewers, not everyone is even if they have done it several times.

Interviewing remains a subjective process. What are you really trying to figure out about the person you are interviewing? Most likely the answer is that you want someone that not only can do the job but will feel they are a fit for the job and the organization. The person(s) doing the interview are making that decision on their own and from the resume.

Behavioral interviews do increase the credibility of the interview process as they are designed to explore behaviors of how the person performs on the job, with others, or contribute to the organization in some way. Those interviews go beyond the “what” – the experience they document on the resume.

Combining the behaviors, experience gained, abilities, and non-technical skills that round out who the person is, beyond their technical skills and credentials, is what competency-based assessments measure objectively. If we look at it as increasing your success rate of hiring the right person for your organization and a job fit that works for the person and the organization, competency-based assessments provide that success rate advantage.

Competency-based assessments
Competency-based assessments evaluate an individual’s skills, knowledge, abilities, and associated behaviors required for a particular job or role that contribute to the individual’s performance. Knowledge develops through experience or learning. Skills develop over time through experience or applying knowledge. Behaviors are how the person responds or acts in relation to the job role and expectations.

Why would you use a competency-based assessment? Competency-based assessments go beyond behaviors alone that some assessments (e.g., personality based) measure. They include multiple ‘tests’ that are used in combination to develop formulas that measure different competencies for individual job roles. Yes, they are job specific and do not require benchmarking. Instead, competencies are assigned based on the job description. That means the results give a more credible analysis of the individual by job role and calculate a job fit score. The job fit score indicates if the person will perform the job effectively.

The other advantage of competency-based assessments is that the results layout a development plan for the individual from the time they are hired and can be used to guide them as they grow in the job or measure their performance over time.

Choosing the hiring method for predicting job performance
Research indicates that interviews alone will likely only produce 1-2 out of 10 hires that will perform the job effectively and remain in the organization as a result. Using other types of assessments (e.g., personality) might increase your chances another 10 percent. Cognitive assessments do increase the predictive validity of your hiring method to 6.5 out of 10. However, using cognitive assessments alone come with their own baggage of increasing the risk of adverse impact.

Competency-based assessments are considered multi-measure, meaning they use a combination of many types, which includes cognitive (in most cases) and increases the predictive validity to 7 out of 10 or more*. In addition, competency assessment reports are easier to interpret by any reader since they give you a score per competency and a job fit score of the overall competency scores. There is no need for training, certification, or understanding of each ‘test’ included. The report includes key strengths or opportunities for growth for that specific job role.

Competencies are typically transferable skills that can be measured so the individual will also feel confident if their job role changes or they want to move around the organization to serve in another role that interests them.

*(Source based data – HRB.org, shared by Frank L Schmidt in a Nov 6. 2012 address to PTCMW)

Contact Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Hiring Indicators to learn more about the Reveal process. Companies and recruiters everywhere have saved time and made better hires utilizing Reveal’s C-fit technology.

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