Unless your organisation hires everyone who applies, you are testing. Some people vigorously deny that their organisation tests applicants, but guess what... interviews are tests too!Whether an organisation uses verbal questions or written questions, they both have the same objective: to separate qualified applicants from unqualified ones before making a significant financial investment on a new employee.
Tests are tests. Is the test you are using working for you?
A Good Test
Separating a good test starts with reliability. Can you trust the scores to remain consistent from one time to the next? This is called "test-retest reliability."Reliability means you can trust a test to deliver similar scores regardless of when it was taken. Otherwise, you would never know whether it was accurate.Interviews, for example, are notoriously unreliable. Interviewers tend to like or dislike applicants; they may ask different questions of different candidates; they may think the objective of the interview is to get to know the applicant (wrong answer!); they tend to rate applicants based on personal appearance; and sometimes interviewers just talk about themselves. Interview test-retest reliability is pretty low.Reliability is not limited to interviews. It also applies to many popular tests used in training, especially ones that measure personality type. “Type-tests” are fine for workshops and communication training, but even some of the most popular ones are filled with reliability problems. Independent reliability studies show scores from a popular four-letter type-test tend to change from one time to the next. If you cannot find any reliability data in the vendor manual, then the test scores may well change from day to day and the results cannot be relied upon to predict work performance.
Using Test Scores for Prediction
Accurate prediction is called "validation. Validation requires knowing clearly what skills are necessary for the job, and doing sufficient analysis to show test scores are statistically correlated with job performance (i.e., the test content and job requirements are causally related).
Why Should I Care?
If cutting turnover in half, doubling individual productivity, reducing training expenses, and building a solid base on future-qualified employees is attractive, then you need to care. These claims are all normal for an organisation that uses reliable and valid tests. Why? Their tests screen-out unqualified applicants.
A Bad Test
A bad test is one that an organisation uses consistently, is backed by folklore and plenty of personal anecdotes, but has never been critically evaluated. Bad tests usually come out of corporate training programs. That is, a workshop participant who answered 10 questions about being a thorough planner was "amazed" when the test reported he or she was exceptionally organised. Next step….use it for hiring!Personal agreement with test scores is not a reliable and validated way of predicting job performance. It is only a summary of how someone describes himself or herself. Is the person actually as organised as he/she says? Or are they faking? If they are not faking, is organisation important to job performance?
Defining the Job
The critical skills that directly affect job performance need to be determined. What are the key behaviors leading to job success or failure? Don't look for results, just the behaviors that lead to the results. If you cannot clearly define the key job skills, then there is nothing to test, as testing must be for job requirements and business necessities. To reiterate, your test first has to be reliable. Then you must know what to explicitly measure. To make sure the test works, determine whether test scores predict job performance. We call this step "validation."
Conclusion
Everything starts with the human elements of job requirements and business necessity. Human elements are seldom included in job descriptions or job evaluations. You have to dig for them. If you cannot test/interview for specific human elements, your tests will probably be inaccurate.All selection tests have to pass rigid standards for reliability and validity. Reliability means the test delivers consistent results time, after time, after time. Validity means the test scores accurately predict job performance and should be done carefully.So next time when you say you don’t use testing, think again. And think carefully about whether your testing is giving you the right answers to your questions
Contact Crossroads HR to further discuss your testing requirements and how psychometrics can play a valuable role in your recruitment process.
