Behavioral Assessments as Part of the Interview Process: Good or Bad?
Are behavioral assessments instrumental in the interview process? Employers and employees alike have been asking this question for some time now. Behavioral assessments are essentially pre-employment tests that provide insight into how an employee might behave at work and other important information about their personality, such as how outgoing or creative they are. They can also give you details about their work style, decision-making approach, and communication style. Popular examples include: DiSC, The Workplace Big 5, Myers-Briggs, and the Caliper Profile to name a few.
The procurement ‘talent gap’ is continuing to grow, and so it is more important than ever for companies to evaluate candidates on more than just their technical skills. If you truly want employees to stick around for the long term, you need to consider how they will add to your company culture, and try to determine whether they will be happy, engaged, successful, promotable, and ultimately rewarded in a way that is consistent with what you can actually offer. Here are a few ways in which behavioral assessments can help.
They replace bias with data
When a candidate walks into a room, you make a judgment about them, whether you realize it or not. Using a behavioral assessment to gather additional data will allow you to remove your own bias (or at least put it into context) and take an objective look at the candidate’s behavioral traits so you can make a fully informed decision.
They help differentiate candidates
When hiring managers have multiple candidates with similar or even identical work experience, and they don’t know how to determine who will be the best fit, they need additional information to support their final decision. When you have a better idea of each candidate’s personality, you will be able to see if they will be a good fit for your corporate culture overall. This will give you another layer of information to use to differentiate between candidates so you can make better hiring decisions.
They help align behaviors with job expectations
While it is important to find a fit for your corporate culture, behavioral assessments can also help you determine if a candidate has the behavioral patterns to make them successful in their particular position. Before you start the interview process, you can create benchmarks with your high achieving employees and then see how potential candidates match up.
They help you tailor your interviews
Once you have behavioral data on a candidate, it can help you determine which questions you want to dig into more deeply during an interview. Are you hiring for a sales role? You may want to find out more about your candidate’s competitive spirit and how that will play out not only in their role but as a member of a team. This will also help bring structure to your interview, a highly effective practice.
Managers know that the hiring process can be long and costly. Using behavioral assessments makes it easy to weed out candidates before you bring them in for an interview. This is especially true when using one of the many available online assessment platforms. Being able to view the data online makes it easy to compare candidates based on the information you have gathered. You can also use the data and learnings to help you make future hiring decisions and to increase the level of success each employee has in their new role.