Re-Working the Hiring and Selection Process

“The secret of my success is that we have gone to exceptional lengths to hire the best people in the world.” – Steve Jobs

Working in the Psychometric Assessment field for some time now, I’ve seen far too often how ‘shining stars’ make it through the interview process only to perform less than adequately in the psychometric assessments stage of the selection process. And while subjectivity and interpersonal impact plays a very important role in deciding whether to hire, train, or develop an internal or an external applicant, the value of psychometric assessments cannot be overstated when trying to uncover behaviours, attitudes, aptitudes and abilities that are somewhat hidden to the outside world.

Numerous studies have cited the significant correlations that General Mental Ability, Personality, Aptitude and Emotional Intelligence have with job performance, and for this reason businesses of all sizes and across all industries utilise Psychometric Assessments to weed out any potential red flags.

However, because of the perceived ‘high’ cost of psychometric testing, hiring managers and HR practitioners tend to advance only those who have made a real and lasting impact on them during interviews onto the psychometric assessment stage. The challenge with this is that sometimes the candidates who have interviewed well do not always perform well in the psychometric assessments. This results in wastage and makes selection decisions even more complex.

So why does this sometimes happen? The simple answer is that interviews are subjective and prone to numerous biases (i.e. halo effect, confirmation bias, anchoring bias, and non-verbal bias), which can change the entire complexion of the interview, and result in poor judgement as to who the ‘good’ candidates actually are.

To mitigate these limitations objective, scientific and cost-effective screening tools should therefore be utilised in combination with or before interviews. Once interviewed and screened the successful candidates can move onto completing more in-depth assessments, such as technical assessments, assessment centres, case studies and more comprehensive psychometric assessments.

Whilst you may assume your costs are going to soar you would be wrong. Screening tools are extremely cost-effective, and this small added cost will ensure that truly only the best candidates move onto the next stage of advanced assessment.

This means you will ultimately get a better ROI on your entire selection process.

For more information on Bioss SA’s screening tools please email info@bioss.com.