In my experience, it is best to work with consultants who do not approach you with a better “mousetrap” for selection, but who can explain to you and show you that their assessment and selection tools measure work-related skills and competencies that have been validated to predict success in the particular job you are trying to fill. It is usually also helpful and telling to ask for case histories from the consultant showing how any job-related assessment tests were used as part of an overall process, and how the implementation of the process led to demonstrated results in improved retention and increased productivity.

In essence, any consultant who provides you with an assessment test should be able to help you review and clarify the job expectations, goals, and competencies that are important benchmarks for success in that job. Will the assessment test help you to gain further insight into those traits, competencies, and skills? Is there a match between what the test is measuring and what you and the consultant have decided is important to measure? Can the consultant administering the test explain why the indices suggested for measurement are related to success in the specific job you are trying to fill? And does the consultant recognize and talk about the “gray areas” of assessment? Here are a few gray areas of assessment that all legitimate consultants should be able to help you with:

Before you implement any assessment test, you have to explain your overall process to the consultant and say something similar to this: “Here is a list of key factors we are trying to assess in our overall process. Can you help explain to me how your assessments will help us get a better insight on job compatibility and help us make a better decision in the overall process? We want to know whether the tests are validated and job-specific. Please help us understand how your services can help our decision-making process for candidates for this particular job with the big picture in mind.”

The best of consultants, and the most valuable of assessment tools in their process, would help you gain greater clarity on the following items:

I have said this before, but it bears repeating: Analysis and use of assessment tests results should never be used out of context with any other piece of evidence in the overall process. That is because many high-performing individuals often successfully compensate for any weaknesses or “low matches” found on assessment tests. Therefore, if an assessment test points out a potential job handicap, it is critical to discover, through subtle questions, whether the candidate believes the potential handicap is true, and, if so, how he or she has adapted behavior in the workplace to successfully overcome this handicap. In a subsequent section soon following, we will provide a complete checklist for monitoring the selection process, and for monitoring and guiding the use of assessment tests and assessment consultants. Before getting to that checklist, however, let us review several questions that are of critical importance in maintaining a high level of quality control in the overall process.

In a way, you have to work backwards to determine which assessments tests and procedures (and which assessment consultants) will add the most to the process. By “working backwards” I mean that it is critical to keep the end goal in sight. Think of that final moment-of-truth interview you will have with your candidate. Will the assessment tests used bring value and clarity to that conversation between you and your candidate, or merely confuse it? In the end, someone has to say yes—not this candidate “could be the one” but this candidate “is the one.” The right assessment tests, properly used, can help you and the candidate both know that yes is the right answer.

The hiring manager and candidate have the two hardest jobs in the selection process. They are the people who ultimately have to provide the final yes and no answers that matter. Personality and competency assessment tests will often give you a “maybe” answer—the candidate may be a fit, but there are certain areas of concern that need to be addressed. So is the answer yes or no? Hire or not hire?

Skills tests will often give you a “maybe” answer also—there are certain skills that seem to be lacking for a best possible fit, but is it possible that those skills can be taught? Resumes will often give you a “maybe” answer—the candidate may not have the experience you are looking for, but that could be because no one has given him or her the opportunity yet to make the most of his or her true talents.

Reference checks will often give you a “maybe” answer—false positives may be created if the reference is afraid or unwilling to tell the truth, and negative biases may be created if the reference has an axe to grind.

In the final decision-making moment, the candidate and the hiring manager will have reached a crucial juncture, in spite of potential maybes. The candidate will have to say yes to the job, and the hiring manager will have to say yes to the candidate. In order to make sure that yes is the best answer for both parties, the hiring manager will have to ask these questions in some way, though the language will be personalized:

No person who is not a high-potential candidate (and who fully understands and wants the job) could possibly fake answers to such questions by reading any book, or attending any interviewing skills seminar.

Few people who have not adequately self-assessed their own fit for the job will make it through those questions, or have a clear and confident answer for you three days later.

The proper role of assessment tests is to help you hold the conversation cited previously, with more clarity. The best and brightest assessment experts and consultants I know understand what the end goal is, and understand that assessment tools help add clarity to the process.

Before you decide to use an assessment test, it is important to share all of the important data points of selection with your assessment consultant, and to see what evidence he or she can provide to help you add value to the process. Here is a checklist that covers many of the important points for consideration. This list is not designed to score the candidate, but to score the process, and to judge how closely you have come to being able to make a yes or no decision with the candidate’s input and agreement.

The purpose of the checklist will be to review how many yes’s, no’s, and maybe’s there are on the page. In the best of all possible worlds, your goal is to have as many yes’s as possible, if you are to be certain that no stone has been left unturned in your hiring process. However, if there are no’s and maybe’s on your list, there are numerous questions that you need to ask yourself before making a final decision on any candidate.

The lower the score, or the more maybe’s you have, the more the process may need to be examined and tweaked. Higher scores (more yes’s) means that you have left fewer stones unturned in your analysis of the job, the qualifications, and the fit. You have performed a high degree of due diligence to assure yourself that the candidate is qualified and the job match is there. But as for the final yes or no answer? That is between you and candidate, after addressing the eight critical points discussed earlier. The following checklist will simply put you in a better position to address the eight critical points in the final interview with the candidate.

The items in bold refer to the areas that a qualified assessment expert could help you clarify—as long the tools are industry-specific and validated.

If you feel that you have given as much attention as you can or is necessary to securing yes answers for the preceding items, then you have done a great deal to help ensure that the candidate knows you, and that you know the candidate.

Job-specific assessments (especially those that are competency-based) can help you clarify many of these points, such as the behavioral skills, personality profiles, and competencies that have been proven to be useful as part of the selection process. There are two ways to get at competency benchmarking—do it yourself, or use a validated instrument. I think both are useful as data points, and so I will explain them in order.

Developing internal competency outlines is a worthwhile exercise, simply because it gets the company thinking about competencies—for many companies, that act in and of itself usually creates forward momentum. In an earlier chapter, we gave exercises that showed how you could use feedback from top performers and other internal contributors to create a simple and practical success model built around competencies. The analysis of competencies in-house is a key step forward in creating competency-driven organizations when companies use the information to help hold deeper conversations with candidates. Such an in-house analysis of competency can help you better identify the expectations and success predictors of the job—using your own knowledge, asking top performers to help you identify those traits, and then seeking information from the candidates themselves to see what they think the success predictors are. This allows you to see how much consistency and alignment there is between what you think, what your team members think, and what the candidate thinks.

Following is an example of a worksheet you can use to as a template to help study the applicability of standard competencies in your environment. Using this as a guide, you can replace any items that do not apply with competencies that emerged from your own internal analysis, as described in previous chapters.

Take a moment to study the following scale. (The scale describes a few competencies that can be measured by validated, industry-specific selection tools.) Think of your own job, or the job of a person with whom you may work. Make two photocopies of the survey page, and study the survey from two vantage points:

Now that you (and perhaps a few others on your recruiting team) have realistically scored such a sheet and created a benchmark for a particular job, you may want to ask a candidate in an interview to honestly give an appraisal for themselves on the same points. This kind of assessment will not give you validated results the way an actual predictive assessment can, and should not be used as a selection device to make judgment calls on candidates, but it could give you a format for asking deeper questions of the candidate, while helping to explain what a “good fit” for the job really means from your point of view. Studying this scale (as an example only) will also help guide you in your discussions with assessment consultants as you work together to create benchmarks for customized success models built on industry templates.

Also, as you study and create benchmark tools for the particular job you are seeking to define, you can add other factors that you know are important, and delete the ones that are not. For example, you might add the following to your list:

The point is, the development and use of such benchmark sheets help you and your team to better analyze the real requirements of the job, and to help you better explain your expectations to candidates.

There is another good use of benchmark sheets that describe the work-related qualities you are looking for in candidates: They provide excellent questions for reference checks. In other words, when you research an individual’s record of performance in the workplace using reference checks that stay focused on job-specific measurements, such as the ones mentioned here, you have something more tangible and more appropriate to discuss than “what can you tell me about this person?”

One of the elements that is not covered by competency models built in-house, however, is industry data on the competencies and skills of top performers in similar jobs. That is why the most thorough selection and screening process will also include a review of industry-benchmarked competencies, and the use of assessment that can help identify such competencies in the top candidates.

Using validated, industry-specific competency models as part of the selection process will help you to ascertain whether you may have overlooked important skills, behaviors, and competencies that are relevant to the job in your own initial analysis.

These assessments and selection tools, such as the ones offered by ASSESS Systems of Dallas, are extremely helpful (and often essential) in providing additional insight on the traits that may be most important to look for in candidates, and the ones that may not be as critical. This provides an extra layer of due diligence in helping to insure that good potential candidates are not weeded out of the process because of false assumptions about necessary job skills.

As opposed to measuring vague or tangential concepts that someone imagined might be related to success on the job, ASSESS Systems’s instruments examine, among other issues, 24 scales based on 350 items derived from the Guilford-Zimmerman Temperament Survey, which incorporates about 50 years’ worth of data and ongoing research into the traits that have been proven to correlate with performance in the workplace.

Utilizing this model, ASSESS Systems builds scientifically valid “competency models” for specific jobs, and its assessments (which genuinely use competency data, unlike some assessments on the market, which use generic and oversimplified behavioral models) examine job competency models from a precise, job-specific point of view.

A good example of this can be seen in the results of the SalesMax test developed by ASSESS Systems, which has been shown to predict performance in earnings in various types of sales jobs.

In brief, validation studies conducted on the usefulness of the SalesMax assessment shows that knowledge of the sales process and personal motivators do not strongly correlate with earnings in top sales professionals. Here are the traits that were found to be associated with higher earnings:

These are among the traits that are often important to measure for professionals in other occupations as well. It is extremely interesting to me that skill, knowledge, and experience did not correlate with earnings in sales professionals, but that these traits did. From this study alone, we can see that there are certain fundamental, core traits of a person’s character, attitude, and approach to the job that may be far more important to consider than skill.

Once the core traits for success in a job are benchmarked, and supported by validated assessments, the interviewer is much better prepared to ask the questions that will reveal the behaviors supporting such traits. The interviewer will not only be better prepared to discuss these core traits with the candidate, but the interviewer will also be able to have more meaningful conversations with references.

Instead of abandoning judgment and giving tests a god-like status, those in charge of hiring must use common sense and realize that it is logical to use job-screening processes and tools as conversation pieces only as they are seeking to help job candidates explain their aspirations and the track of diligence they may have documented in pursuing their aspiration so far.

According to leading employment lawyers, the following questions should always be asked when considering the use of any employment screening test:

In this context of creating job-related interview questions, questions such as the ones on the following list can certainly be used as a reference point in thinking about, talking about, or asking questions about an individual’s track record in a previous job or jobs:

Clearly, as an employer, you have a right to consider whether people you are about to hire have demonstrated these or similar traits in previous jobs (if these traits are important to you), and you have the right to seek out such information in reference checks, if the reference is willing to share his or her thoughts on these job-performance-related issues.

For some jobs, you may assert that persistence, or another factor listed, is not so important to you. And that is fine. But we highly recommend that you make a list of the character traits that are important to you for specific jobs. Again, a character trait, by our working definition, is a trait that can be documented by an observable action pattern of behavior throughout time.

In recent years, many companies have used the concepts of competencies and competency models to define the broad behavioral capabilities necessary to achieve the behavioral objectives that will guide the activities of people in the organization. Others have used concepts such as success factors or human capital strategies to describe critical abilities and attributes desired in employees to give the organization a workforce that will be able to achieve strategic goals.

These concepts and others focus human resource processes on the most important capabilities, and provide a global framework for defining desired behaviors and the knowledge, skills, and other attributes necessary for achieving these behavioral goals. If they are well developed, competency models will capture not only the business strategy, but also the critical elements of the corporate culture and values.

The biggest obstacle in the popularization of competency models is efficiency, both in the development and in the implementation of models. Often, companies avoid undertaking competency modeling because they perceive the effort required to be too great: “It will take too many people, too much time, and too much money to develop.” The second major obstacle occurs at implementation. Finding a way to quickly and efficiently link selection tools (such as assessments and interviews) or development tools (assessment, 360 feedback, developmental resources, and so on) to competency models is a challenge that many organizations face.

The value of online assessment testing is that it provides a wide array of pre-employment tests and development assessments for current employees. These tests are designed to be used in an integrated selection process; each includes an interview protocol and follow-up interview probes based on test results. Although each test measures characteristics important to a specific job type, all have at their core the prediction of productivity, cooperative work behaviors, and integrity.

It is important to make sure that the tests you use are developed by organizational psychologists, validated for specific jobs and industries, and predictive of job success. As explained by the industrial psychologists we work with, processes incorporating the right assessment tests can help companies create a model for strategic human resources and accomplish the following goals more effectively.

People in prosperous companies use this strategy to guide:

Good competency models help to guide these HR processes:

Leading companies are also utilizing the following additional services and tools provided by industry-validated competency models.

As stated at the beginning of the chapter, it is important to ask any assessment consultant working with you to help explain how the use of these tools can be incorporated into the overall process, using case histories wherever possible. Following is a case study from ASSESS Systems and my partners at VantagePoint, Inc., showing how the use of assessment tests as an overall selection improvement process was able to significantly affect earnings.

A large international call center organization with locations in more than 32 countries needed a solution to its hiring challenges. The company had a high turnover rate, and had implemented several measures it hoped would alleviate the problem. After reviewing and enhancing its compensation rate, creating a hands-on realistic job preview, and redesigning its training program, the company was still concerned about the rate of turnover.

It was determined that the company was missing the last critical piece to its process. The company needed a pre-employment testing tool that would help identify those individuals who had a productive attitude, were good at persuasion and diplomacy, and liked to work in a structured environment where performance is closely monitored.

A complete job analysis was conducted, identifying those characteristics important for success, and a large group of call-center agents were tested using a custom-developed test battery. Performance ratings were analyzed—the results were statistically significant. The newly developed survey was added to the selection process and launched in all locations, providing hiring consistency throughout all sites and eliminating any cultural bias.

Lower turnover and increased productivity were evident in a short period of time. Within four years, turnover had significantly dropped from double digits to 4 percent. Equally importantly, productivity also improved. Booked revenue increased significantly above the 12 percent annual increase goal to no less than 20 percent on a consistent basis each year.

The purpose of presenting the case history was to reiterate a key point we made earlier: before implementing assessment tests, make sure the consultant who is advising you can provide clear case histories showing how the assessments were used as part of a larger process, and how they helped to achieve documented results.

So far in the book we have focused on tools and processes for helping to identify top performers and improve the process for selecting them. In the next chapter, we will begin to focus more intensely on the “spirit” of excellence, showing how and why high-performing individuals are those individuals who are true to themselves, and who have carried this authenticity into most of the career decisions they have made.