Talent Assessment Tools: SELECT the Best
Select the Best: A How to Approach
Behavioral interviews are the best tool to identify candidates with the ideal behavioral traits and characteristics that you have selected as necessary for job success. Additionally, certain behavioral questioning will tend to be situational instances. The best behavioral-based questioning, however, will not give away the behavior being verified. As you read the followingtips on How to select the ideal candidate through behavioral assessments below, please note that the behavioral questioning is preceded by behavioral identification and a job description extracted from a comprehensive job survey to make the behavioral questioning more effective and successful.
How to?
- Start by identifying what you want the employee to do on job.
- Use job evaluation and write a job description to describe the requirements of the position.
- Determine the required performance success factors for the job.
- Determine [by mirroring internal as well as external performance benchmarks] the characteristics and traits of the ideal individual who will succeed in that job.
Benchmarks Mirroring:
- If you have employees successfully performing the job currently, list the traits, characteristics, and skills they bring to the job.
- Narrow the list to your key behavioral traits for the job.
- Write a job ad or job posting that employs the behavioral characteristics in the text. Make sure the characteristics list the same behavior traits.
- Make a list of questions, both behavioral and traditional, to ask each candidate during the behavioral interview. This will allow for stable legal defense and allows you to make comparisons between the various answers and approaches of your interviewees.
- Review the resumes and cover letters you receive with the behavioral traits and characteristics in mind.
- Phone screen the candidates who have caught your attention with their qualifications, if necessary, to further narrow the candidate pool.
- Schedule interviews with the candidates who most appear to have the behavioral characteristics, along with the skills, experience, education, and the other factors you would normally screen for in your resume review.
- Ask your list of behavioral and traditional questions of each candidate you interview.
- Narrow your candidate choices based on their responses to the behavioral and traditional interview questions. Complete the selection process using these recommended steps.
- Select your candidate with behavioral characteristics that match the needs of the job in mind.
The benefits
Answers to these behavioral questions can help you make comparisons between candidates and their approaches to the job requirements. You will have a good idea about how the candidate has approached specific situations similar to the your own work environments in the past.
The traits & characteristics which have been identified will provide you with the most ideal candidate who will most likely succeed.
Sphere: Related Content
I agree with everything that has been said in the comments above and the challenge initially is to accurately define what you want the candidate to do as well as expectations of performance. As an executive coach, I use many different descriptive personality assessments in my preparation and creation of a client’s development plan. In addition to these, I have found a very effective assessment vehicle that is predictive of skill capacity and can accurately predict a candidate’s performance in a specific role, making it a value added tool for selection, development, succession planning, and most recently for redeployment.
The tool is called the HR CHALLY (http://www.chally.com)and I have found it to be very accurate in identifying skill gaps which manifest in behaviors on the job. Since it measures a candidates “Talent DNA”, it lives with a candidate for their entire career. The scoring provides an accurate depiction of skill capacity, from which additional capability can be developed. Experience on the job does not impact the scoring and since the profiles used to measure the candidates skill capacity are specific to their jobs, their scores can be run against a number of different job profiles, enabling you to design a development plan which is targeted to their career path – hence saving money and resources on training and development for roles which a candidate will not be successful. The tool is also EEOC compliant so it is a legitimate vehicle for selection.
If you are looking for an accurate measure or prediction of success in a specific role, I’d recommend you take a look at this tool and use it conjunction with other personality assessments, which typically pick up preferences and learned behaviors that can change over time.
If I can answer any questions about the Chally, I am happy to help. You can contact me at angela@ieaventures.com.
Best regards,
Angela Tallman
Leadership Development Coach
IEA Ventures Inc.
303-339-0996
Good succinct article!
From my experience, the problem usually starts during the HOW TO phase. Employers often don’t know exactly WHAT the hiring goal is, WHY it’s important and exactly HOW this is achieved. A clear and shared understanding of these questions defines exact skills requirements and motivations – dramatically improved hiring success and employee performance. This is however extremely difficult to achieve with traditional tools such as text because it’s laborious for people to read and has no agreed structure so the key points can easily get nmissed or mis-interpreted.
For those interested, this tool maps exact requirements in terms of WHAT needs to be achieved (the job goal), WHY this is improtant (motivation for doing the job)and exactly HOW this is achieved (skills)in a way that everyone can quickly understand: http://www.knowgenes.com/RecruitmentAndHR.aspx
Kind Regards,
Mark Ridgwell
Start by identifying what you want the employee to do on job.
Use job evaluation and write a job description to describe the requirements of the position.
Your process here is extremely well defined and if followed, it will definitely improve job performance, retention, productivity and revenues. You might also want to try a product that helps to re-enforce this mantra in the organization. I have found a product that helps to automate each part of your process. Benchmarking,automated screening and stack ranking for the right attributes and customized behavioral interviewing tools. It is called Hire-Intelligence. They offer a free trial and the ability to embed and this into your consulting practice and re-sell to your clients. I use this with all of my clients and have achieved very compelling results!
For those of you who are interested here is the trial link http://www.hire-intelligence.com/trial-1hiresite.html