Let Assessment Tools Do What They’re Supposed to Do

In my two previous Insights, I mentioned that it’s important to do research and ask tough questions of your assessment tools sales person.

To help further explain this, here are a couple examples.

Example Number 1:
I once worked with an in-bound call center in the financial services industry that was very much concerned with their weak retention rate. Their turnover was 60 percent a year! We did a benchmarking study for them to identify people who left versus those who stayed on or were successful.

Once they used this template that I prepared for them, the next year their retention rate was 100 percent! So that was a clear hit for our client and for us.

Example Number 2:
Another client provided home healthcare professionals to homebound people. These professionals went in and helped homebound people with their personal hygiene, helped feed them, etc. So it didn’t require high-level skills, and the salaries were pretty minimal. These jobs, however, required a great deal of patience and a great deal of psychological fortitude.

Still, this company had a turnover rate of 100 percent a year! In other words, they could not get most of their employees to stay with them for 12 months. So again, we developed a template to identify the individuals who did stay and those who did not, and within the year after they started selecting people using the results of the benchmark, their retention rate went up to 83 percent for new hires. Now, that’s pretty impressive.

Why These Examples Matter
These are the kinds of examples that a Human Resources (HR) manager can ask their assessment tools sales person to provide.

These are the kinds of tough questions that need to be asked when you’re doing assessment tool research.

You want to say to the sales person:

• Tell me about your success stories.
• Tell me about where you’ve been successful in identifying individuals you should not have hired in the first place.

This is a very important way of identifying management “gut feeling” failures, where essentially the job applicant can tell you a good story about their work experiences, but the assessment tool does a much better job of identifying potential problem areas with the applicant. The manager may have a “gut feeling” about the applicant, but they need to rely on the assessment tool to do its job.

“Gut feelings” are an area where managers get into trouble because their “gut” tells them whether this applicant would be a good employee, so they hire them, when really the manager should’ve relied on the assessment tool to really determine if the person fits  the job.

Unfortunately, the results from “gut feeling-decisions” are often not very useful. Probably “gut feelings”  are better for choosing dinner entrees rather than selecting job applicants.

It’s important to do research and ask tough questions of your assessment tools sales person.