Unlocking the full power of employee assessments
In the most recent edition of the Harvard Business Review there is an article titled "Ace the Assessment" where they cite well known studies showing that fully 76% of companies with over 100 employees use assessments as part of the interview process and that the number is expected to grow to 88% over the next 5 years.
It also notes that assessments are used more frequently the more senior the role. They find that assessments are used for 80% of senior roles and for only 59% of entry level ones.
What the article doesn't touch on is that historically this gap between the assesment of senior and junior roles was much wider and is quickly narrowing. This is due to the fact that the tests were fairly expensive to administer and so companies only used them on their most "valuable" employees. Now that they have moved into the cloud and are delivered via a SaaS model not only are more companies using them but they are using them for more of their employees.
Smart companies have always used assessments for their best employees because they work. Or rather, they work when they are used correctly. And when used correctly they are a powerful tool to help companies achieve their ultimate goal of putting the right people in the right job at the right time.
However, it is one thing to use assessment tools and another to unlock their full potential for transforming your workforce.
Assessments and the solutions built around them are anagolous, in some ways, to Microsoft excel. For those of us who are not corporate accountants, or CFO's, excel spreadsheets are neat and useful for some of the tasks we need to complete. But most of us only use about 10% of the technology found in the program. Your CFO uses 95% of the functionality and for him/her it is a powerfully robust tool that is indispensible to their job and dramatically increases the effectiveness of their organization.
Similarly, some organizations only use assessments, for instance, during the interview process and then throw them away. By doing this they miss out on the tools powerful potential.
When used throughout the entire employee lifecycle from recruitment to onboarding to training and development assessment tools are able to transform your workforce by enabling more effective teams, driving engagement, spurring innovation, decreasing retention and increasing revenue.
