An online personality test or behavioral assessment is a powerful tool used in the interview process to determine if a candidate is the right person for the open seat in your company.
This is valuable for business owners because when assessment results are evaluated in combination with a work sample and structured interview questions, you can form an accurate prediction of the candidate’s future performance in the job.
There are many good assessments available to choose from. How do you know which one to use? Which assessment is going to give you the information you need to make a good hiring decision?
Choosing the right assessment paves the way to your ultimate goal: to find the right people for the right seats in your company. It’s a big decision and investment, so you will want to carefully consider what you need it to do and for whom.
We’ve come up with a few tips that can help you choose the assessment that will work best for your organization.
What a pre-employment assessment actually measures
A good assessment does not tell you whether someone is a good person. It tells you how they think, how they are likely to behave under pressure, and whether the way they work fits the seat you are filling. That is a narrower claim than most vendors make, and it is the one worth paying for.
Used properly, an assessment is one input of three. The other two are a structured interview, where every candidate answers the same questions, and evidence of past work. Any one of those on its own is weak. Together they are the most reliable prediction of job performance available to a small company.
The four types of pre-employment assessment
Most tools on the market are a version of one of these four, or a bundle of several. Knowing which is which stops you buying the same information twice.
Cognitive ability
Measures reasoning, problem solving, learning speed and attention to detail. This is the type most consistently linked to job performance across roles, and the type most often left out because it feels harsher than a personality questionnaire. If a seat involves judgment under ambiguity, you want this.
Behavioral and personality
Measures work style: how someone handles conflict, pace, structure, detail and autonomy. Useful for understanding how a person will operate inside your team. Not useful as a pass or fail gate, because there is no universally correct profile.
Skills and work sample
Measures whether someone can do a specific task, from writing to modeling to running a meeting. The most convincing type for a hiring manager, and the most work to build, which is why most companies skip it. A small, realistic sample beats a long generic test.
Values and culture fit
Measures alignment with how your company actually operates. This one is only as good as your own clarity. If your core values are not written down and used, a culture fit assessment will just reflect whoever wrote the questions.
How to choose between hiring assessment tools
Tip #1: Go for simple
The assessment should have simple instructions for the candidate to follow, and results that are easy for you to interpret. Results that “read like tea leaves” will make you feel frustrated, confused and less confident in the process.
Tip #2: Make sure it measures the right behaviors
The behaviors you need for an outgoing, energetic salesperson are different from the behaviors required of an analytical CFO. Make sure the assessment you choose has the capacity to measure all the behaviors of all the positions you will need to fill in your company.
Tip #3: Mental aptitude is a must
The assessment you choose should be more than a personality test. While personality is important to know about, an assessment that measures mental aptitude will help you understand how that person thinks, their attention to detail, and their ability to do their job.
Tip #4: Applicable during the interview and beyond
Your assessment tool isn’t just for the interview. It can also be used to evaluate current employees for promotions or other opportunities that may come up in the future.
Where hiring assessments go wrong
Four failure patterns account for most of the disappointment:
- Using a personality result as a pass or fail gate. Personality describes style, not capability. Screening people out on a style score removes good candidates and narrows your team in ways you did not intend.
- Testing for the job as it is today. If the company will be twice the size in two years, assess for the seat that exists then.
- Letting one number outrank everything else. A score that contradicts a strong interview and solid references is a prompt to dig, not a verdict.
- Skipping calibration. Run your existing high performers through the assessment first. Until you know what good looks like in your own company, a candidate score has nothing to sit against.
One more worth saying plainly: any tool used to make hiring decisions should be job-related, and the provider should be able to show you evidence that it predicts performance for the kind of role you are filling. A vendor who cannot produce that evidence is selling you a questionnaire, not an assessment.
How many assessments do you actually need
For most growing companies, one. A single assessment that covers both cognitive ability and behavior, used consistently across every hire, is worth more than three specialist tools used occasionally. Consistency is what lets you compare candidates to each other and to the people already succeeding in your business.
The exception is a senior seat. When you are hiring the person who will run the business day to day, it is worth adding a work sample and a deeper conversation about how they operate. That is how our Integrator search works, and it is the same logic applied with more rigor.
What we recommend
VisionSpark recommends using the Achiever Assessment, a multi-faceted assessment for every employee at any level in your organization. The Achiever creates a comprehensive candidate profile by measuring six cognitive learning skills correlated with 10 personality dimensions. It helps reveal a candidate’s talents, introduces objectivity into the candidate selection process, and provides a clear base for comparison across candidates.
