Let’s Break it Down: Pre-Employment Assessments v. Matching
These days it seems like every recruiter has a love/hate relationship with pre-employment assessments. On one hand, they simplify hiring and reduce time-to-hire. On the other, they are overly formulaic, irritate candidates, and are easily manipulated. Just last week, I was talking to a recruiter who thought it was time to throw in the towel on pre-employment assessments. She thought it wasn’t worth the headache and wasn’t convinced the results were any better then her gut.
What she didn’t realize was that there is a new option: resource matching. Charles Handler wrote a fantastic article on matching last week. Using this as a jumping off point, let’s dive into a comparison between pre-employment assessments and resourcing matching.
Pre-employment Assessment
Pre-employment assessments work to predict an applicant’s future performance in a position. The most complex versions take a multi-faceted look at personality, measuring a personality blend to see if it’s a good match for a specific role. Other options include assessments that measure a singular personality trait which is highly correlated to success within a position (e.g. zest and sales). Finally, some pre-employment assessments measure specific knowledge or perform situational assessments to determine how a person will act in the workplace.
Pre-employment assessments have legal challenges and have to comply with EEOC standards. There is a potential for legal issues as questions might discriminate against a protected class or be considered an invasion of privacy. For example, Target got sued in Saroka V. Dayton Hudson because of questions from a psychological inventory they asked security guards in their California stores. The questions delved into the applicants’ sexual and religious preferences, which the courts ruled was an invasion of privacy.
These types of assessments are often most useful when there is a large dataset of labor to predict performance and you are hiring a high volume of similar positions. For example, retail or food services are good places to implement pre-employment assessments.
The major concern is that these assessments are cookie-cutter and lack granularity. They can’t do a very good job of distinguishing between the same title within different teams or between different managers. In addition, they are of little use in situations where there is not a large pool of labor who has had or currently holds the same job.
Matching
Matching relies on determining what specific emotional or cognitive resources are needed for a specific position (not merely a title). This means granular measurement not only as to who would be a good salesperson, but who would also be the best salesperson to work at our company with a specific manager. Most hiring examines this level of granularity for skills, but not currently for things like character strengths or emotional intelligence.
Matching is based upon profiling both a specific position and the applicant. To do this, multiple contributors answer questions about a specific position. On the other side, applicants answer questions that uncover their emotional and cognitive resources. These two profiles are then compared to let you know which applicant is the best match. In matching, assessments are merely used as the means to gather data, rather then as the overall tool.
Resource matching provides a few benefits over assessments. First, it allows you to be more granular in your hiring. Second, it avoids many of the legal issues of assessments as you are merely matching people rather then making subjective decisions based on someone’s predictive assessment results. Matching may be the new kid on the block, but using them is a big opportunity to start hiring people who will love their work as research shows that people who use their character strengths at work are happier and less depressed.
In addition, matching provides a valuable way for recruiters and HR managers to include business leaders in the hiring process. It’s an efficient tool for business leaders to define what they’re looking for without sapping lots of time. Matching makes your hiring and decision-making processes more tangible to other stakeholders in your company.
The recent rise in matching is a result of technology evolving to fill the need. With the rise of cloud computing and distributed software, it’s now feasible to have employees in disparate locations contribute to building position profiles and then to have candidates all over the globe complete a personal profile.
But matching doesn’t need to stop there. Over the next few years, expect to see the idea of resource matching coming to performance management, career pathing, team analysis, and more.
Sean Glass is the co-founder of EmployInsight, a HR technology company that helps enterprise customers use emotional and cognitive resources in their hiring. Before EmployInisght, he was a co-founder of HigherOne which went public in 2010. In addition, he is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania’s Masters in Applied Positive Psychology Program (MAPP) and attended Yale University as an undergraduate.
Photo Credit: flickr/albertogp123