The Complete Guide to Recruitment Assessment

What is recruitment assessment, what does it consist of and how can it help your hiring process?

Each recruitment and selection process is unique. Some organisations are scrupulous with their recruitment processes and take every precaution to ensure the right candidate is hired. Other companies, though well-intentioned, place an emphasis on factors, characteristics and skills that aren’t necessarily reflective of an ideal employee.

As an experienced HR consultancy in Surrey, Davis Associates works alongside your organisation during the final stages of the recruitment process. Our expert business psychologists ensure you have all the objective data necessary to hire the best possible person for a given position.

We already know recruitment assessment can save organisations serious amounts of money and time. Objective assessment can provide a clear prediction of a candidate’s personal style and work ethic, as well as an indication of their likely future performance. To give you a clearer idea of what recruitment assessment can do for your company, let’s address what it is and what steps are involved during the process.

What is recruitment assessment?

Recruitment assessment involves interviewing, testing and assessing a pool of candidates in measurable, quantifiable ways to determine whether they are suitable for a given position. This negates the need for hiring managers and organisations to rely solely on an interview, or a ‘gut feeling’ about a candidate, which can often prove unreliable and costly. Objective recruitment assessment can boost performance, increase revenue, increase retention rates and improve motivation within a workplace.

To help source the perfect employee, we at Davis Associates, combine a mixture of job analysis, executive assessment, psychometric testing, assessment centres, behavioural exercises and competency-based interviewing. Organisations are left with a comprehensive analysis of their candidate’s’ competence, strengths, weaknesses, motivations and attitudes. This information will not only be useful during the recruitment and selection process, but will also prove beneficial for the candidates’ ongoing development and for succession planning too.

Use executive assessment to highlight key skills

As part of an executive assessment, we engage with our clients, performing a comprehensive job analysis to determine what the core competencies are for the given role. Once the relevant qualities, skills and attributes are confirmed, this goes a long way to streamlining your recruitment process and through appropriate promotion and advertisement, you’ll help ensure the right pool of applicants apply. This stage should not be overlooked, considering the 2015 study by Opinion Matters which found 51% of UK HR managers claim poor job descriptions are prompting high turnover rates, while 59% state incorrect job descriptions waste time, as they result in employees with inappropriate skill sets.

Once the appropriate competencies are determined, we select the right tools and techniques to test for these attributes. More than likely, this will involve the use of psychometric questionnaires, which along with our Executive assessment process will help to give an indication of the prospective employee’s cognitive ability, personality, managerial judgement, core values, motivation and working style, not to mention potential derailing behaviours. It will also keep in mind critical factors, such as whether or not the individual will be suitable to your organisation’s culture and fit within the current team.

This is followed up by formal interviews, during which we validate the insights derived from our questionnaires, psychometric measures and assessments. It is essential that a qualified and experienced business psychologist interprets the results of any objective tests and performs the subsequent follow up interview, as others may not be in the best position to interpret the data.

Our business psychologists at Davis Associates have been at the forefront of psychometric assessment since the early 1980s and have worked with a wide range of roles and industries, so you can be confident that we are well placed to advise you on all your assessment needs.

Use psychometric tests to assess integral characteristics

Given that the internet has greatly facilitated the job application process, many candidates prospectively apply for a given role, regardless of whether they are truly suited for it. This makes the job of the hiring manager much more difficult, as they have to sift through countless CVs and applications to find an appropriate short-list of candidates. Occasionally, however, ill-fitting candidates still filter through, so psychometric tests are an integral part of our recruitment assessment and provide a great way for companies to scientifically separate those who best ‘fit.’

Organisations can make use of psychometric tests to determine and highlight measurable attributes, including personality, emotional intelligence, motivation, leadership potential and critical reasoning. Using these tests, managers can begin to understand their candidate’s work style, core values, personality traits and likely behavioural competencies. The success and reliability of psychometric tests various widely between providers, however their popularity can be seen from the fact that about 80% of the US Fortune 500 and 75% of the UK FTSE 100 companies now utilise them. Notable examples of corporate giants who make use of these tests include Ford, KPMG, Hewlett-Packard, Procter & Gamble, Microsoft and even McDonald’s. In the right hands, it has also been shown that psychometric tests can cut recruitment costs by up to 40%.

Assessment centres are used to directly compare multiple candidates

Assessment centres are often used during the latter stages of the recruitment assessment process. The remaining, promising candidates are given a number of exercises which will help to determine their suitability for the job by observing skills and competencies. This stage also gives employers the prime opportunity to discover whether or not each candidate’s character would fit well within the organisation.

Assessment centres are beneficial as they are an extremely efficient use of time. Applicants are all brought together in one place, at the same time, allowing for direct comparison. These assessment centres also allow the skills of each candidate to be objectively compared against their competition, using specially selected tasks with hiring decisions often being able to be made on the same day.

Davis Associates has helped clients across the globe boost productivity, improve performance and reduce turnover rates with the use of effective recruitment assessment. Find out how we can help your business climb to greater heights.