For most jobs, suitability/behavioural factors are about 50% of the reason people succeed or fail at a job. Therefore, effectively measuring suitability is an essential part of a good assessment.
The importance of assessing behaviour during recruitment is evidenced by the fact that most organisations hire people for their eligibility and then try to develop their suitability. And in many cases, they fire them for their lack of suitability.
Since behaviour is fundamentally more difficult to change than eligibility, it is better to hire people who already have the right suitability for the job.
Recruiters and line managers often do not carefully analyse how to evaluate the combination of eligibility factors. This leads to confusion and miscommunication, as each party is likely to have a different idea when it comes to selecting whom to interview and whom to hire.
In addition, this lack of clarity makes it especially difficult to use other assessments. For example, if you are using behavioural assessments, unless you are able to know the person’s level of eligibility, how can you make an overall determination?
Recruiters and line managers must be able to determine how these two aspects combine in order to make effective decisions.
Suitability/behavioural factors are more difficult to assess because, unlike eligibility factors, there is no objective and verifiable information that is readily available. In addition, suitability factors are much more interrelated, and subtle balances between factors have significant implications for behaviour.
To make it even more challenging, applicants have a significant incentive to withhold or distort information that might hinder their job opportunity.
This is highlighted by a recent study that determined that 80% of resumes contained lies.
In many cases, people are not even fully aware of their behaviours. In addition, the behavioural requirements for each job type are very different.
The behaviours required for a technical expert, manager, office administer, customer representative or salesperson are all very different.
Not only is it unlikely that a recruiter will have a complete grasp of the combination of behavioural factors related to job success for each job, it is much more unlikely that the recruiter can accurately assess each applicant related to each factor.
Considering the above, it is no wonder that interviews have a low ability to predict behaviour.
Behavioural assessments have a much better chance of gaining insight into behaviour/suitability because they have a pre-designed strategy that structures questions and carefully considers interpretations of the questions. However, to be effective, behavioural assessments must:
- measure a large number of factors;
- effectively manage lie prevention and detection;
- produce results related to specific jobs;
- offer an overall job specific score that guides interpretation.
The best suitability assessments measure a wide range of different types of factors including motivation, attitudes, work preferences, work values, work environment preferences, and interests.
In doing so, you can capture all the important suitability factors related to job success. A behavioural assessment that focuses only on personality will have significant gaps that will hinder its ability to predict job success.
The Harrison Assessment results in 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 lifecycle-from recruiting and hiring… to performance management… to learning and development… to leadership development and succession planning… to team building.
Employers can strengthen their Decision Analytics even further by tailoring our assessment to their specific jobs. Harrison Assessments makes this easy by providing them with more than 6,500 Job Success Formulas and a Job Analysis Toolkit.