“I feel that person A will be a better hire than person B….”

How do talent assessment tools help in the selection process?

A competency-based assessment aims to better hiring decisions by moving it away from intuition-led process. Talent assessment tools aim for objectivity than being subjective in method. This process is continuous. And with the number of researchers and psychologists and human behavior experts/students who are actively taking part in the advancement of this field, we can only hope for better and better systems to be made available

Traditional assessments and hiring practices relied heavily on human intuition and thus created a whole lot of bias. Talent assessment tools enabled hiring practitioners to look deeper than rating candidates on their aspirations or opinions. This is possible through the identification and isolation of individual personality traits that are benchmarked (internally at the workplace) for success on the job.

In personality-based assessments, questions are asked that require reference to specific events (e.g. “How would you feel if…?”). There are no general answers as the replies could be anything since the assessment will aim to identify individual types based on the initial job analyses and the resulting job description. Candidates are asked to focus on specific incidents. By examining how a candidate has actually approached real situations in the past, we can judge more accurately how they will act again in similar circumstances.

Multi-variate testing, as well as drawing on enormous empirical data, recruitment decisions can be justified since the outcome ceases to be an individual assessor’s choice. A consensus is reached.

This means that new hires will have the benefit of expert opinions and reasoning of all stakeholders, improving candidate prospects in the company. The whole process can also result in enough data and evidence that can potentially prove critical in justifying hiring decisions, possibly a solid defense from litigation, if ever the need be.