Are traditional hiring assessments worth the investment?

By Greg Muller, Founder & CEO at Gooroo

If you’ve ever worked in HR, management or applied for a job in the past decade, it’s highly likely you’ve used or taken part in some form of behavioural or skills assessment - personality testing, numerical reasoning, aptitude, technical or cognitive skills assessments.

Testing and screening potential hires is now a booming business; according to our internal modelling, technology companies alone currently spend $14billion globally in time in the screening and shortlisting stage of hiring.

With Australia facing severe skills shortages in areas like technology and jobseekers becoming increasingly careful and savvy in the types of roles and companies they’ll apply to, the pressure is on to get hiring right the first time. It’s in every business’s best interest to proactively optimise recruiting practices and understand a candidate as well as possible through behavioural and skill assessments.

Unfortunately, traditional assessment methodologies aren’t delivering the return on investment they promise. According to a 2015 study by the Brandon Hall Group, 45 percent of bad hires are attributed to poor screening processes.

The problem isn’t necessarily the tests themselves or that the information they reveal about a candidate is incorrect – it’s that these tests aren’t being applied properly, their focus is generally limited in scope, and their theory base limited in relevance to the originally intended purpose.

What’s wrong with traditional testing methodologies

Exclusionary vs inclusive testing

One major problem with traditional assessment methodologies is that they’re inherently exclusionary. The goal of the tests is to search for a defined set of skills, attributes and behaviours and if a candidate lacks too many, they’re automatically ruled out. When access to talent is tight, this is a critical flaw.

Organisations must start considering not only whether their employees have the skills or attributes, but also whether they have the ability and character to learn new ones – assessment tools need to start including people based on their potential to succeed, learn and fit within an organisation’s culture, not simply to provide a static view of a person.

Gooroo uses artificial intelligence and neuroscience to predict the future contribution of individuals to companies. We believe in moving away from 'exclusionary' hiring and filtering people out, to 'inclusionary' hiring where we look at the whole pool and who has most potential to succeed.

Who we are is not who we’ll become

When it comes to traditional assessments like personality tests, the user must assume the subjective responses given by participants represent the actual personality of those participants, and further assume that personality is a reliable, constant part of the human mind or behaviour.

Essentially, they assume performance in one environment will carry over to another work environment, and ignore the fact that people are capable of change. Arguably the greatest issue with traditional assessments is that they reflect on where a person is now against the context of their past, but don’t say anything about their future – who they want to be, and what they’re capable of achieving if given the chance. Everyone wants to believe in their own capacity for change. How else will we move forward, challenge ourselves and achieve new things in life? Psychology and neural science tells us the past doesn’t predict the future and that people have the power to change their minds and their access to opportunity.

Gooroo assesses people differently by understanding the paths people take when faced with a decision or something unknown. Assessments that can chart a path on how a candidate will approach a problem will give a much clearer picture of how they will behave in a particular role and company.

If companies continue to use testing that looks retrospectively on candidates, they’re missing the exciting part - and many potential hires.

Context is everything

Not only are traditional assessments static by design, they also fail to review candidates in the appropriate context – of workplace, family life or project. While companies may claim to do this during interviews, it’s likely they would already have ruled out handfuls of good potential candidates. What’s more, qualitative assessments are inevitably laden with unconscious bias.

Companies must identify the social, cultural, economic and behavioural factors that influence an individual’s behaviour and their capacity to perform in a job – and they must rely on technology to do this to remove their own bias. Gooroo assesses an individual’s “mindset” using complex technology to forecast the potential of an individual and determine who is likely to contribute to the growth of the firm.

Contextual testing is also vital to building teams who work well together. With traditional assessments, a company would look for ‘gaps’ in personality types or competencies of existing teams and attempt to find people to fill them. But simply bringing in a person with contrasting skills does not necessarily mean they will gel with the rest of the group. We need the ability to test for potential and predict how someone will behave when forced to work with a team quite different from themselves; gap filling may not always be the right strategy.