7 Things to Look for in Your HR Assessments Provider

Organizations wishing to improve must have data to guide decisions and change. Here, HR assessments are a powerful tool, delivering the data to make better hiring decisions, to improve employee performance, and to guide talent development.

HR assessments include a range of tests and insights designed to map and quantify employee behavior at every level. This includes tools from the ever-popular 360-feedback to tenacity assessments, emotional stability assessments, and ability profilers – giving employers insight into how their people think, behave, and react. That data can then be used in understanding why people and teams act the way they do, what is needed to create optimum behavior in those teams, and how to get there.

Yet, HR assessments must still be chosen with care, based on their ability to deliver insight, value, and usability. Organizations must choose assessments that are not only convenient but reliable and, most importantly, effective. In most cases, that means choosing an assessment provider capable of matching your organization to assessments that work for you, delivering control over data, and internet accessibility.

Reliability and convenience in using HR assessments

Any assessment is only as valuable as its reliability. Here, reliability is typically defined as the assessment’s ability to measure what it claims to measure and in such a way as to produce the same results when the same candidate, in the same state of mind, takes the assessment again. In addition, you must balance the need for a high-quality and effective test with convenience. Assessments must be cost-effective, must fit into reasonable timeframes, and must be relatively easy to interpret by HR personnel – even without significant training.

In most cases this means:

• Matching the assessment to the job. The assessment must measure factors relevant to the specific role or employer.
• Validating assessment applicability to the employer, ensuring that data provided is relevant, valuable, and capable of producing value in decision-making within the organization
• Ensuring that data can be updated as it changes within the organization, so that profiles and reports are up-to-date and relevant.
• Integrating assessment data into people management tooling, so that profiles can be matched to the people they’re based on.

Convenience is also a critical factor in HR assessments. If you want people, especially candidates, to take assessments, they must be accessible and bound to a reasonable timeframe. This often means that the ideal testing solution is on-demand testing with shorter tests – rather than single, very long tests. In addition, in order to keep internal costs low, HR assessment centers must provide organizations with the tools to manage data and assessments in an optimized way.

Factors to consider when choosing HR assessments

Your assessments must provide the data your organization needs. However, before that, you need an assessment provider that can offer the tooling to manage those assessments in a reliable and convenient way.

1. Efficient Data Collection and Management

Good data management is key to having reliable data, preventing errors, and to keeping costs low.

• Report revisions – You should be able to make changes to reports after creating them. This may be to correct errors, to add new information, or to merge several assessments.
• Bulk uploads – HR teams should be able to upload data in bulk to save time and administration costs.
• Mass scheduling – Employees should be integrated into the system and HR staff should be able to schedule a large number of assessments at once to reduce administration costs.

2. Flexible assessment taking options

To maximize convenience, HR assessments should offer flexibility in delivery methods. Offering options such as online assessments or online proctoring allows employees to complete assessments at their convenience, leading to increased participation rates. Flexibility and convenience are critical to ensuring that employees actually take tests – as well as to keeping costs low.

• Assessment center – An online assessment center or development portal dedicated to delivering on-demand assessments and learning. This should be compatible with all major web and mobile browsers to ensure accessibility. In addition, it should offer global assessments, eSkill, Carnegie Speech, and academic assessments.
• Virtual testing – Virtual testing is a must for any assessment center. Online testing means candidates and employees can test online, in their own time, meaning that time, availability, and travel are reduced as barriers to assessment-taking.
• Mobile adaptability – The assessment center should be fully accessible via mobile devices, either via an app or via a mobile browser. This is increasingly important when hiring younger generations who may rely on a mobile device as a primary means of accessing the internet for work and personal use.
• In-person testing – Face-to-face testing will always provide insights in ways that online testing won’t. In addition, being able to provide assessments to employees on the work floor, while they are at work will always be practical as part of workshops, training, and team building.

3. Availability of test options

It’s crucial that your assessment center offers the assessments that your organization needs to make good decisions. Those assessments will vary from organization to organization. Therefore, you’ll typically want to look for either a wider range of options or an assessment center that can match assessments to your specific needs. Some of the most valuable include:

• Tenacity assessment / Mental toughness assessment – measuring candidates’ ability to cope with stress and adversity or to persevere despite adversity.
• Emotional stability assessment – Assessing emotional stability and where the candidate shows emotional instability
• Ability profiler – Showcases specific skills for a role, whether technical or specialized, as well as attentiveness, detail-orientation, communication, computation, and problem-solving skills.
• DISC personality profiler – Maps the candidate to the DISC theory, highlighting strengths and potential weaknesses, and creates a map for coaching, development, and potential team relationships.

Of course, your organization may need another specific assessment, such as field review, 360-feedback, HR cost accounting, or management by objectives. It’s important that your assessment center be able to work with you to deliver the tools you need.

Conclusion

HR assessments are an increasingly important part of the hiring process. In 2022, 78% of HR departments state that assessments have improved their hiring process. 79% list the results of an assessment as “as indicative of a successful hire as traditional hiring data on a resume”. Yet, you need those assessments to be reliable, convenient, and accessible. That often means choosing the right assessment center, which can provide you with data management tooling, on-demand portals and assessment centers, and a range of assessments to meet your tooling needs.

If you’d like to learn more about fitting HR assessments to your organization, team, and business needs, contact Asia Profiles Pacific for a consultation.