Sep 16, 2013 | Blog

Assessment Is Assessment Is Assessment.

Optimize Your Talent Strategy

Back when business was really booming and the fiscal year came close to an end, I frequently would get calls from any number of customers who would say they “needed to do some assessments.”  When asked what they were trying to accomplish or what their goals were, most of the time the client would indicate that they really didn’t have any goals, but they had some budget they needed to use up before the new year and thought it would be fun to do some assessments on their team.

 

While the glory days of snatching piles of cash from customers like these are long gone, there is a nasty byproduct of this “we just need to do some assessments” mentality that is present in just about every assessment engagement present throughout the year.  Whether for personnel selection, high potential identification, employee engagement, leadership development, coaching or succession, many corporate professionals still have no idea why they are using a psychometric assessment as part of their initiatives.  They just think they should.  As a consequence, most lack the insight to identify the right provider or use the tools to their fullest extent. 

 

Here’s something alarming; many of my colleagues and I have heard that there are potentially 2600 assessment providers in the United States alone.  In China, the lunar calendar is still used to make decisions about people.  In France, graphology (handwriting analysis) is still used to make decisions about people.  Point being, few assessments are really good and there is zero barrier to enter the field, folks.  What this means is anyone can generate some questions and claim to be an assessment expert.  I have come across many poor tools over my career, but I think there are probably 50-80 providers whom I would consider to be “top-tier.”  Of those, they all have something unique and beneficial to offer.

 

However, because the assessment space has become so commoditized, many of these good providers tend to position themselves as being good at everything.  For example, personality is important for every job, intelligence is important for every job, emotional intelligence is important for every job.  So… buy our test for every job in your company!   Not so fast.  If you are the person responsible for bringing that tool into your organization, someone will eventually ask this question, “what value are we getting out of this investment and what is our ROI?”  Uh-oh.  Well, here are some things that everyone should consider before buying a tool based on general reputation, price or perceived universal usefulness.

  • Good tools used for the wrong purpose will fail to demonstrate value.  Leveraging tests of intelligence at the executive level can be useful to gauge decision-making style, but can get you into potential legal trouble if used for factory floor workers.  Granted, most corporate customers do not want to manage 45 different solutions that are all focused on different things so a balance is often desired between best-in-class and manageable.  Fair enough, so think of things in terms of overlap or “job families” such that if one solution can be used to support a (e.g.) hiring or development initiative in three different business units, then all the better, provided there is job analysis evidence to support this approach.  In the end, drawing a clear line of sight from the assessment to the business objective is the most critical factor from which to begin to ensure a successful assessment program. 
  • Good tools with poor deployment and implementation will fail to demonstrate value.  Getting support from an executive sponsor with the gravitas to make sure things are going to get done is critical.  As is getting all the various people involved and brought in early to make sure it gets pushed as deep as it is wide into the organization. HRIS, IT, legal, diversity and inclusion, recruiting, business unit leaders, etc., -can be big barriers to a successful implementation down the road if not engaged early in the process.  Involve the training department to help educate and inform users of the assessment so there is no guesswork about (a) what it is (b) why they have to use it (c) how to interpret and (d) what, if any, flexibility they have in leveraging the results.
  • Good tools tied to poor organizational data will fail to demonstrate value.  Using any test or assessment and assuming it will be directly and instantly related to a reduction in turnover, increase in performance or any other factor that is important to your organization is ludicrous.  This can only happen if you have had numerous and challenging discussions about the criteria data you plan to use to show that relationship and how it will be tied to the assessment results.  Assessments are an easy target for ROI, because they fall into that commodity space where procurement folks want to know the cost per head.  But the best rifle in the world cannot demonstrate its accuracy without a sufficient target at which to aim. 

Back to the first bullet, once the business challenge is unearthed it should be incumbent on the assessment provider AND the organization to spend the appropriate time to identify what success looks like, establish the path to measuring that success, then implementing in a way that eliminates any uncertainty of getting to a successful result.  In closing, keep in mind that the title is accurate:  assessment is assessment is assessment.  It’s what you do with it that makes all the difference.

 

James H. Killian, Ph.D. is Vice President | Research & Advisory Services with Chally Group Worldwide, headquartered in Dayton, OH.  Chally Group focuses on helping companies drive profitable growth by supporting their execution of data-driven winning strategies in sales and leadership development.