With the growing interest and application of assessments as part of a data-driven talent acquisition process, understanding factors that may limit your organization’s use of assessments is important. Your recruiting process is potentially one of those factors. The recruiting and sourcing process potentially creates a bottleneck that reduces the effectiveness of your assessment tools and ultimately your talent acquisition process.
The validation process is an important step in the setting up a talent assessment solution. This validation process provides you the foundation to identify an appropriate pre-hire assessment profile. The strength and breadth of your labor pool is an important consideration in determining how stringent you can be in designing that profile. If you design the pre-hire assessment profile to be very stringent or selective, fewer candidates will “pass” the assessment process, potentially making it more difficult to fill job openings, but those candidates should be better qualified to perform well on the job.
To illustrate this, consider the following example taken from a contact center organization. In this example, two assessment hiring profiles were created based on validity evidence and analysis of the candidate population. In Profile 1, a 75% pass rate was modeled. This means that out of every 100 candidates, 75 will “pass” the assessments and be eligible for hire. In Profile 2, a 50% pass is modeled. This means that only 50 out of every 100 candidates will pass the assessments and be eligible for hire. The premise is that the more selective the hiring team can be, the greater the probability that they will be able to hire an individual who will perform better.
For simplicity purposes, we will assume that all candidates who pass the assessment process are hired. We will also examine $$ collected per hour as the performance metric used to determine quality of hire.
Under Profile 1 more candidates pass the assessment process. This means that more candidates who are potentially low performers are allowed into the talent pool for consideration; however, the trade-off is that recruiting can recruit fewer candidates per job opening because more will pass the process (making openings easier to fill).
However, under Profile 2, the average performance increases because those lower performers are eliminated by the assessment process. The trade-off is that the recruiting team needs to source 66 more candidates to reach 100 hires.
* Baseline = $ Collected/Hour by employees hired without the use of pre-hire assessments.
In this example, the hiring team has two options to consider. Both options provide them with a substantial improvement over the baseline performance of employees hired without the use of assessments. However, if recruiting can maintain enough candidates at a 50% rate to meet their fill rates, then they have positioned the business to benefit from a potential 30% performance improvement in $ collected per hour.
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