In my last Insight, I explained the common mistakes employers make when using integrity and honesty testing in their job recruitment process. 

To expand further, there are some important steps to take to make sure you are using honesty and integrity testing safely. The goal in using such tests is to identify counterproductive behaviors and attitudes of applicants before they are hired: 

1. First, look at the policies you have in place at your company—Is there anything within your current policies that would concern you about using an honesty and integrity test?
   
   For example, there a few states like New Jersey and Rhode Island that have laws around using honesty and integrity testing in the hiring process.
   
   So if you’re thinking about using this kind of testing, you should first check to see if there is anything specific to your state that would either prevent you from using them or identify special requirements for using them. 
2. Conduct a predictive blind study—What a blind study would do is to allow you to determine if an honesty and integrity test can help predict counterproductive behaviors in your workplace. The way this works is that you would begin to ask applicants to take the honesty and integrity test, but you wouldn’t score them or report the results.
   
   That way you can continue to hire on the same criteria that you have now. It is important at the beginning of this process to document your current statistics for turnover, theft, shrinkage, worker’s compensation, safety issues, etc.
   
   Then after six months or more, you can work backwards to figure out “if” you had used the statistical information provided by the honesty and integrity test results, how accurately would it have predicted issues you are finding with the newly hired employees.
   So you have actually documented the validity of being able to use the tool in your recruitment process to predict the counterproductive behaviors such as those listed above. While this process requires some time and attention, it can be the safest and most reliable way to ensure you are using these tests properly and can defend your use of them if challenged.
   
   You would continue to document issues such as shrinkage and safety issues over time to ensure the tests are having a positive impact.

An Example 

We recently heard from a staffing client in the healthcare industry that recruits and places direct home healthcare workers. 

Three years ago, they incorporated honesty and integrity assessments, as well as behavioral assessments, into their recruiting process and have seen some dramatic results.
 
Their retention rates rose from 60 percent to 70 percent in year one to 81 percent a year later! This is resulting in huge savings in turnover costs for their clients.
 
Not only have the retention rates risen dramatically, but they are also finding that the attitude and integrity test results are helping them in the behavioral interview process. 

One example shared was when they had an applicant that scored poorly on the hostility scale, and in using the behavioral interview questions provided in the report, the applicant admitted to using “force when necessary with a patient who was uncooperative.”

They shared many of these stories with us of “flushing out the issues in the interview” since the test had pinpointed potential problem areas. 

Final Thoughts

Here are some final thoughts on the subject of the validity of integrity and honesty testing: 

• Recently, the Wall Street Journal reported that they did a poll of companies and an alarming percentage—24 percent—said theft of supplies and products was up. Eighteen percent of the companies said that cash theft was up, as well.
  
  I talked about honesty and integrity testing in my last Insight and above, but that is only part of the overall hiring puzzle. You also need to, at the very minimum, make sure you are not bringing people into your organization who already admit to having these kinds of issues.
  
  But secondarily, companies really need to pay close attention to their policies and procedures so they make it more difficult for people to do dishonest things.
  
  For example, don’t make it easy for employees to get their hands on cash and supplies without you knowing about it.
  
  
• As time goes on, there are new issues in the workplace. Two current issues are employees who have counterproductive attitudes and behaviors around sexual harassment and computer misuse. For this reason, in 2004 we implemented new scales on our honesty and integrity test that measure counterproductive attitudes and behaviors around these two issues.
  
  Now we can actually measure people’s attitudes toward inappropriate ways to interact with other people on the job, as well as, inappropriate ways to use the computer, confidential information as well as the Internet while at work. 

It is important to consider safely utilizing tools such as Honesty and Integrity tests to measure counterproductive behaviors and attitudes of applicants.

Today, many companies use pre-employment integrity and honesty tests to help detect job applicants who admit to having counterproductive behaviors such as propensity for theft, sexual harassment, hostility and substance abuse, but these tests are sometimes controversial. 

It’s a little bit of a catch-22 for employers, because they need to do everything they can to screen out problematic and even dangerous individuals, while at the same time being careful to follow acceptable hiring practices.   

There are restrictions and sensitivities around what you can ask and what you can’t ask, so it’s a balance that employers need to have in order to use these testing tools in a manner that is valid and legal. 

Some employers look at integrity and honesty testing and assume that you can’t use them, or may otherwise have a misconception about them. (There are a few states that have passed restrictions around the use of honesty/integrity testing, so employers should consult their own counsel to find out if there are any restrictions within their state.) 

Common Mistakes or Misconceptions 

• Using honesty and integrity testing as a go or no-go—Companies sometimes use honesty and integrity testing as a ‘yes/no’ for hiring. Companies should not typically use any one single piece of information as a go or no-go. That’s not an indication of an effective and legally defensible selection process.
  
  

Good selection processes typically consider several pieces of criteria that are job specific that provide an overall picture of the fit of the individual for the job.  Most honesty and integrity tests ask very specific questions about things the individual has done or believe is OK to do in the workplace. If the employer doesn’t follow through to ask the behavioral interview questions to dive deeper around these items, they may screen out high quality individuals who had issues in the past, but they don’t today.

• Not using an honesty and integrity test for fear of how applicants will react—Companies sometimes don’t use these tests because they assume they will turn-off applicants.
  
  The reality is that more and more companies now use all kinds of assessments and employment testing in their hiring process, so it has become a more common practice. Most companies find that the use of honesty and integrity testing is widely accepted by applicants, particularly at the entry and mid-level type positions. At the higher paid and more skilled positions, there can be some impact due to the perception of applicants who are highly skilled and don’t perceive they should be subjected to these types of questions. The value of the information is the same, and in some cases even more important, because these positions may have broader access to financial data, security and other highly vulnerable information.
  
  
• Giving honesty and integrity tests to your current employees—This is a BIG no-no. There are two reasons for this:
  
  1) Let’s say you have an employee named Sally whose performance is fine and there are no issues with her as an employee. Now you give her an integrity and honesty test and she admits she has some counterproductive attitudes. Now you have information that is dangerous to you because if you act on the information and she hasn’t done anything wrong, you’re setting yourself up for legal challenges.
  
  2) These tests are not valid for current employees, because the validity and scoring for honesty and integrity tests is built and validated around the mindset of an applicant. Applicants typically exaggerate more and/or are less willing to openly offer information versus an employee who is not as concerned about answering the questions in a straight forward manner. 

Honesty and Integrity tests can provide very critical information for employers to consider as part of their selection process, but care must be taken to determine how to use them effectively and legally. 

In my next Insight, I’ll give you some steps to take to ensure the validity of integrity and honesty testing in job recruitment. 

This article is intended to provide general information only. Employers are encouraged to seek legal counsel before implementing any kind of pre-employment testing.

In my last Insight, I explained some common mistakes employers make regarding cognitive testing. I then gave some steps you can take if you want to be more effective with using cognitive testing. 

A client project comes to mind when I think about the impact of cognitive testing and job fit.   

The company was one of the nation’s largest suppliers of building materials, and they came to us with a request to help them assess their current people in a particular job. 

The company had previously created a new position and they had a well-written job description for it. Then they went out and hired a bunch of people, but they made the cardinal mistake many companies make: They hired what they believed were high-thinking, go-getters—very bright, self-directed, self-motivated individuals for a job that didn’t actually require ongoing problem solving once the job was learned. 

So we did a study for them and we created a benchmark by assessing all of their employees within the job and their respective level of cognitive speed, as well as their personality traits. 

We had the company rate the employees based on actual performance and then compared that data to the scores from the assessments. The data showed that we were right on the money in that, among other personality differences, the people who were struggling had the highest cognitive testing scores, and the people who were doing great had average scores. 

The people who were consistently failing were the ones who had tested as having high cognitive speed. These employees were learning the job very quickly, but they also got bored. 

This is an example of why it’s important for companies to do their homework and create a benchmark so they can use the data to help select individuals who match the job requirements and therefore have a greater chance of success in the job. 

Final Thoughts

One of the potential dilemmas within manufacturing environments is hiring individuals who may become bored within their position and therefore have a greater potential to skip over safety procedures and other ‘boring’ tasks.  

In these cases, the employee isn’t fully engaged in their job because it’s “old news” to them. They’ve done it a million times and don’t think they need to give it their full attention anymore. This can sometimes cause employees to injure themselves or skip a step in the procedure and hurt someone else. 

Along with measuring personality traits and how they impact job fit, properly matching cognitive speed to the job requirements can have an impact on minimizing safety violations within your company. 

You want your employees to be fully engaged in their job and this is influenced by how well they are matched to the job requirements. 

This also gets into the personality component of cognitive testing—you need to not only know what level each employee is at when it comes to learning new things and their cognitive speed, but as in this client example, you also want to couple that with knowledge of whether or not the individual is a structured-type employee and if he/she can handle a job that stays the same and routine over time. 

Find out what works best within a job, and then match incoming employees to that criteria in order to ensure good job fit resulting in a positive impact on productivity while minimizing safety issues.

Cognitive tests are “assessments of the cognitive capabilities of humans and animals. Tests administered to humans include various forms of IQ tests,” according to Wikipedia.org. 

If utilized properly, cognitive testing can be used for many purposes, such as to screen prospective employees for job fit, promotions, career development, training, communication and coaching, as well as team building. Some studies have shown that the cognitive speed of an individual has greater impact on job success than personality characteristics, such as extraversion or the ability to deal with stress. 

Legal Requirements for Testing and Common Mistakes

Cognitive testing can be a little bit scary because of our legal climate in the United States, and in some other parts of the world, so you really have to be careful if you choose to use cognitive testing. Specifically, according the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, cognitive testing must not be “designed, intended or used to discriminate because of race, color, religion, sex or national origin.” Title VII also prohibits employers from using testing that, although neutral on its face, has an effect of disproportionately excluding persons because of their protected class where the tests or selection procedures are not “job-related and consistent with business necessity.” 

A common mistake that employers make is they assume fast cognitive speed is always good, but that’s a totally false and too broad assumption. 

Cognitive speed is relative to the specific job requirements. The reason companies get themselves into trouble is they’ll just make a blanket statement in their hiring ad where they say, “We want bright, fast problem-solvers,” and “We want people who can think strategically and do long-range planning.” 

But if these requests don’t relate to a specific job, that’s when the company can get into trouble legally because the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the Department of Labor (DOL), all consistently will tell you—as previously mentioned regarding the EEOC and Title VII—that assessments are acceptable and can be beneficial only if they’re used and administered properly, are relevant and necessary to the specific jobs and do not have either a purposeful or disparate impact on any particular protected job class or classes (i.e. a particular race or age group). 

So an important step to keep yourself from getting in trouble is to make sure that if you are going to use cognitive testing, you know exactly what is needed in the specific job and/or situation for which you are using the information from the tests. In other words, employers should ensure that such tests are properly validated for the positions and/or purposes for which they are used. Along these lines, it is essential that the managers who will implement these tests and selection procedures understand the processes and the applicable limitations in applying them. 

For example, the cognitive speed might be different for two “Customer Service” roles within the same company. What if one of these roles requires the individual to deal with complex technology issues from clients, while the other deals with routine calls that do not require any particular expertise? These two positions might even have the same pay, benefits, etc., but truly be very different in their problem-solving requirements. 

Steps to Take to Use Cognitive Testing Effectively in Hiring or Promotion

Critical steps for using cognitive testing are to conduct a good job analysis, as well as to identify a benchmark for the job.  

1. The job analysis will allow you to determine very precisely what the job requires in terms of activities, competencies and day-to-day behaviors necessary for success. 
2. Benchmarking is a process where you rate individuals who are doing a particular job, test them with the cognitive test and then statistically correlate what level of cognitive speed is common to high performers, versus average performers, versus struggling performers.   
3. Apply the information you gained in the benchmarking process ‘consistently’ to your hiring and promotion decisions, and then track the results over time to ensure and validate that your benchmark is effective and does not need to change. 

Essentially, what you’re doing is documenting what levels of cognitive speed work best in that particular position. This not only ensures that you’re using the cognitive test properly, but it also gives you the ability to defend yourself legally and say, “I have done my homework. I know what it takes for this particular job.” 

Once you have data showing how a particular cognitive test relates directly to a particular position, it also is equally important that you administer tests and other selection procedures without regard to race, color, national origin, sex, religion, age or disability and apply the cognitive testing to all applicants seeking the job at issue and not just pick out certain individuals for testing. This will help to ensure compliance with applicable Title VII and EEOC mandates. 

What you’ve done, then, is made the use of the cognitive tests job specific so you know which level of cognition you’re looking for in your applicants or internal employees for promotion.  Remember that ALL tests, interviews, work history, background or other pieces of data you utilize in your hiring or promotion process are ‘one’ piece of information in your overall process. You should never put too much weight on one single piece of information! 

In my next Insight, I’ll give some cognitive testing examples to help illustrate the points I made in this Insight. 

In my last Insight, I mentioned that behavioral interview questions should be targeted. It’s also important for companies to audit and review their interviews to make sure they are being conducted properly and effectively.  

It is helpful to choose someone—an internal HR specialist or an external consultant, for example—to sit in on a few interviews and listen to the types of behavioral interview questions being asked. The reviewer will get an opportunity to hear what the interviewee’s response is and watch how the interviewer is documenting the responses. This will help the reviewer determine if the questions and overall process are effective. 

It is helpful to get an outside perspective from someone who is not involved in actually conducting the interviews. 

Measuring Behavioral Interview Effectiveness

Another way to tell if the behavioral interview process and questions are effective is to track—over time—your turnover rates and performance reviews for the people that you’re bringing into your company. Are you really getting the type of person you thought you were in the interview?  Are they exhibiting the types of behaviors you expected based on your documented responses to the interview questions? 

You’ll also want to think about your response to this question: “How do the person’s responses from their interview translate to how well they’re doing on the job?” 

The proof is “in the pudding.” If the person isn’t performing the way you expected them to, it’s likely your interview process and questions are not effective. 

Having been in the assessment industry for 20 years and a co-founder of an assessment company, I always thought that people were more interested in measuring somebody’s personality and their cognitive reasoning to see how it compares to the job-at-hand. But the input that we’ve been getting over the last few years is that clients are really much more thrilled with the applicant specific and targeted behavioral interview questions that come from the assessment process, because it helps guide and steer them toward asking the most effective questions they can. Each assessment gives the employer behavioral interview questions to ask a particular candidate based on how they scored on the assessment, as well as being specific to the job category report they chose. 

And when our clients do this, they have told us frequently that they’ve been able to reduce their time-to-hire by 50 percent! The behavioral interview questions have streamlined their process tremendously.  We are thrilled to hear this. 

For Example

An in-bound call center company that we worked with—one of the largest financial companies in the country—said they implemented the behavioral interview questions that were coming with the assessments they were doing and they were able shorten their interview time by 50 percent.

They said to us, “We spent half the amount of time interviewing people and our retention rates went up.” As a result, they were hiring more appropriate people who fit the jobs they had available, but to them the big-bang was the fact that they were spending only half the time interviewing than they used to, which directly affected their bottom line. 

We were impressed at how this company was truly paying attention and tracking their time and results. This is important because most companies don’t actually know how much time they spend on recruiting and other human resource management tasks, such as interviewing, even though such tasks definitely affect the bottom line. 

Using targeted behavioral interview questions, taking the time to monitor the effectiveness of your questions and interview process and keeping track of your turnover and process time, will help your company more effectively hire the right person for the job and streamline your processes.

For the last decade, most companies have subscribed to the fact that they don’t want to just ask close-ended interview questions anymore. They don’t want to ask questions such as, “Do you think you’re a good leader?” because, of course, if the applicant is any good at interviewing, they’re going to say, “Yes, I think I am.” But this response doesn’t really tell you much about the candidate, their skills or their job experience.

Behavioral Interview Questions
Behavioral interview questions are basically a way of asking an applicant open-ended questions that really explore what they’ve done in the past to get them to talk about actual experiences, instead of theoretical or philosophical experiences that they may not have even had before.

A behavioral interview question takes a concept, such as leadership, and allows the interviewer to ask something to the effect of, “Joe, give me an example of when you have been part of a group that you were leading and you ran into a performance issue with one of your employees that you had to deal with—What was the issue and how did you resolve it?”

With a question like that, you’re really getting the applicant to think. They have to think about their past and instead of coming up with some hypothetical response, they have to think about something that’s happened to them.

This way, you get a more genuine response from the person and get to know their leadership style and how they tend to go about solving problems. From this information, the interviewer can figure out if the applicant has the leadership style that the company is looking for.

One Common Mistake to Avoid
One of the common mistakes made regarding behavioral interview questions is that interviewers often ask the same behavioral interview questions to every applicant.

There’s a point of being consistent—obviously companies want to be consistent with their interviewing—but different jobs have different needs. And if you ask all applicants for all jobs the same behavioral interview questions, you’re probably asking them things that aren’t necessarily relevant for the position they’re interviewing for.

Companies often don’t take the time to really think about the kind of information they want to find out from each applicant, such as, what kind of competencies are necessary for this particular job?

If you know ahead of time what you are looking for, you will be able to pick out some behavioral interview questions for each position that you might not ask candidates for other positions.

Companies need to streamline their interview process so that they are spending the best time with the applicant talking about things that are really relevant for that particular job versus the shotgun approach where you throw every question at every candidate, and then the interview takes a lot longer than it needs to.

This is the key mistake that a lot of companies make. And some will argue and say, “Oh, but we do behavioral interviewing,” but they don’t go a step further and do something that I call targeted behavioral interviewing.

In my next Insight, I’ll give you steps to take to ensure that you’re using behavioral interview questions effectively.  

In my last Insight, I talked about what a leadership skills assessment is, now I’m going to explain why you should use leadership skills assessments in your workplace.

Why Use a Leadership Skills Assessment?
One of the biggest challenges for businesses today is finding and retaining good talent. The two most common reasons why people leave companies is due to a lack of job fit and because they don’t respect or get along with their manager.

If you think about it…if you don’t do a good job of finding employees who “fit” their jobs, then you will have even more difficulty finding current employees who can be groomed for leadership positions. It is even worse, however, when companies promote quality employees to leadership roles when either they don’t naturally fit the leadership position or they haven’t been properly trained.

In effect, there is a shortage of leadership in business today, so it is even more important for companies to utilize quality assessments to determine fit and then provide quality training for effective leadership. Obviously quality leadership or the lack thereof dramatically affects profitability of any organization.

One of the main reasons leadership skills assessment is so important is because you don’t want to put someone in a leadership role that really doesn’t have the core traits to be successful. When this happens, not only does the company lose, but the individual really loses. This is because they may have been a very productive and motivated employee originally but now they’re in a role where they don’t feel comfortable or effective.

And it puts even more pressure on the employee because they don’t want to go to their boss and say, “I know you had confidence in me and promoted me, but this is really not a good fit for me.” No one wants to admit the mistake or the problem.

Both win—the company and the employee—when you take the time to measure leadership abilities.

A Professional Example
An example of a time when I helped a client conduct a leadership skills assessment was when I worked with a large, luxury car company. They wanted to give their production employees an opportunity to opt in to be promoted to supervisor or mid-management, but they wanted to be very private about it. They wanted to give individuals an opportunity to self-explore whether or not they wanted to apply for a job in management.

So what we did was develop a way for their employees—anybody in their organization—to click on a link and go to an assessment test they could take and immediately get a report of their results. What the report did was compare the employee’s traits to the common traits for leaders at the company, and it explained to them not only how they compared, but it also gave them tips for how to have better leadership skills. For example, if the results page said someone was less extroverted than the typical leader, it would also list some things that employee could do to stretch themselves and be more extroverted or more motivating to the people around them.

Then based on these results, the person could decide whether or not it was going to be a good move for them to attempt to get into management. The best part was the questionnaire was completely anonymous so none of the employees felt embarrassed or put on the spot in any way.

This client’s management team loved the approach we came up with because it took some of the pressure off of them. They also felt that when employees did apply to supervisory jobs, they had a better understanding of whether or not they were a good fit.

There are two different types of leadership skills—hard skills and soft skills.

An example of a hard leadership skill could be something such as creating a strategic plan or planning an agenda for a staff meeting. These are skills that can be taught and improved with experience.

A soft leadership skill could be something such as the ability to handle the stress of confrontation with non-performing employees or the ability to enthusiastically present an idea to a group of employees.

There are assessments that measure both hard skills and soft skills:

1. A hard skills assessment—will measure “what” someone knows about a particular task, such as knowing how to create an effective strategic plan. Hard skills assessments can be used for pre and post training to determine if an individual is learning a particular skill as a result of the training.
   
   
2. A soft skills assessment—will measure “core” traits of the individual, such as their level of extroversion or tough-mindedness. Soft skills assessments measure traits that are stable over time and are not typically affected by experience or training.

As you can imagine, there are very high quality training programs in the market to address the “hard skills” for effective leadership, but if an individual does not have the “core” traits necessary to naturally be effective as a leader, then the training is much less effective and may not improve the performance of the individual in any meaningful way.

My company, therefore, focuses on soft skills assessments and determining what level of natural ability an individual may have as a leader.

Measuring Soft Skills

Soft skills are measured using validated behavioral assessments. In the psychometric world there’s a concept called the “Big Five,” which are the five core traits that all psychologists agree can reliably measure someone’s soft skills. The “Big Five” are:

1. Conscientiousness
2. Likeability
3. Unconventionality
4. Extroversion
5. Stability

There are also other measurements that are important beyond the Big 5. They are team orientation as well as social desirability to make sure the individual is being straight forward in their responses.

Let’s take the extroversion scale for example.

Studies have shown that effective leaders usually have a higher level of extroversion and they use this to make energizing presentations and “sell” their ideas to their team. If someone is lower in extroversion, it doesn’t mean that they can’t lead other people, but they may have a more difficult time getting others exciting and motivated to do their jobs.

This is not a “training” issue but a more of a “style” issue that can hold the person back from being an effective leader. On the other hand…if you have a higher level of extroversion and you couple that with training on how to make effective presentations, the individual is likely to be more effective.

In my next Insight, I explain why you should use leadership skills assessments.

Assessments now come in all shapes and sizes, and the employment assessment industry continues to grow at a rapid pace.  The good news is that there is greater information available now regarding these assessments.  The bad news is that there can be so many to choose from that it is difficult to determine which ones are best for your business.

There are hundreds if not thousands of different employment assessments available today.  So many of them are developed by small companies and only sold locally that it is impossible to know exactly how many there are.  So let’s break down the basics:

Employment assessments generally fall into 4 categories:

1. Behavioral Assessments (Personality Characteristics and Traits)
2. Cognitive Assessments (Speed of Learning and Problem Solving)
3. Skills Assessments (Measure hard/learned skills and capabilities)
4. Attitude Assessments (Measures attitudes and self-admissions to certain behaviors such as honesty)

Some of the basic ways that employment assessments are used are:

1. Pre-employment screening
2. Coaching
3. Team Building Training Succession Planning Outplacement

Steps to take “prior” to choosing employment assessment(s):

1. Outline or review your corporate human resource strategy.  Where is the business or your business unit growing or changing, and what people resources are you going to need to fulfill the overall strategy? 
2. Then, it is critical to clearly understand the tasks that must be performed within each job.  Performing a job analysis is a critical step prior to using employment assessments.  If you don’t know what the job requires, it is very difficult to know if you’re hiring people who can be successful in the job.  It is also critical that you are documenting “why” you are looking for particular traits or skills within a job.  Regardless of whether you use assessments, this step is the cornerstone to creating a solid and legally defensible selection system.  To say that “I need to hire people with good math skills” should be “documented” as a skill that is actually important for success in the job versus just being a skill that you “think” is important.
3. Now that you understand what each job requires, you can begin to determine which employment assessment(s) can help you get the information on “Fit”, “Skills” and “Attitudes” within your selection process for each job.  Please see the section below on what you should look for in choosing assessments.

Items of importance when choosing employment assessment(s):

1. The most important thing in choosing an assessment is making sure that it is valid and reliable for the purposes for which you intend to use it.  For example, there are “behavioral/personality” assessments that are completely valid for training and development but not for hiring.  Be sure you are comparing apples to apples when considering various assessments.
2. Choose assessment(s) that have current validation studies and technical manuals that have been updated within the last couple of years. 
3. Unless you are prepared to spend a lot of money on training and professional interpretation, choose assessments that are easy to use and understand.  This will allow you to build an automated process that utilizes technology rather than labor.  Your managers should be able to use the assessments and information without expecting them to become experts in assessments.

Some other things to consider in regard to employment assessments:

1. A good personality/cognitive assessment will allow you to be efficient and utilize the information from the assessment for more than one purpose.  You could use the information throughout the lifecycle of the employee for on-boarding, training, succession planning, team development, etc.   
2. Choose a vendor that can grow with your company over time.  Particularly if you have divisions or departments that are in other countries, choose a vendor that can support international assessment requirements.
3. Choose a vendor that is committed to providing you the highest quality at a reasonable price.  With gains in technology, it is no longer necessary to pay high prices for assessments.
4. Be careful to choose assessments that do not require lengthy time requirements.  Many applicants will not sit through an hour of an online assessment.  The “fall out” rate for qualified candidates is high enough, so you don’t want to ask them to spend more time than is necessary to get good quality assessment information.

As technology becomes more affordable, it will be easier than ever for smaller companies to compete in the global market.  As competition grows more intense for the same products and services, the true competitive advantage for any company is their people.  Hiring, coaching and motivating employees who “fit” their respective jobs is the competitive advantage that can make or break the business!  Today there are high-quality, affordable tools that make the selection process easier and help ensure that you are indeed making great “people” decisions!

Given the importance of assessments to ensure that your company is hiring the right candidates, one of the best ways to explore assessments is to set up a free test drive account.  

Julie Moreland is a founding partner and President of PeopleClues. During the past 20 years, Julie has become a nationally respected authority on practical business applications of assessment technologies.