We're so busy, it's been hard to make time for the blog. In the past few months, demands for assessment testing have grown dramatically, which pulled us away from making time to communicate. Today is the first day of getting back on track with spending more time talking to our visitors.
Resource Associates now offers more than 100 pre-hire tests online. Tests are available for specific jobs, for aptitude and skills, personal style, and more. Over the past few years, we’ve received an increasing number requests for an online service, and are excited to lead the industry with this offering. The ease of our new system will make it even simpler for today’s overworked business leaders to hire great people, people that fit the specific duties and culture of any given career.The tests, as well as a comprehensive offering of sample reports are available at www.resourceassociates.com.
Several sample assessment reports are now available at the Resource Associates web site. We'll be uploading more reports each day for the next few days, so please check back soon if the one you're wanting to see isn't yet available.
To some degree, almost everyone wants to think of themselves in a positive light and most of us want others to think well of us. The scoring formulas we use to measure personality are designed to take this “self-inflating” phenomenon into account. Also, the items (questions) are designed so that not everybody answers the same way--those differences between people give us the information on which to distinguish between people and make predictions about future behavior on the job.
Content Validation Studies: Sometimes a validation study involves simply documenting that the content of the job is similar to jobs for which the tests have been previously developed and validated. This approach is often used with a new company where no employees have been hired, or a situation where there are only a small number of employees in one job category.
Concurrent Validation Studies: Sometimes, a validation study involves using the tests on current employees and correlating their test scores with measures of their job performance. When the company can provide a large enough group of employees in one job category, we can do a full-scale correlational study. The Concurrent Validation Study requires large sample sizes (150 or more people in one job category).
Predictive Validation Studies: Other times, we can start with job candidates and follow them through the job orientation and initial training process to evaluate whether the tests could predict which people were more successful than others. This type of study also requires a large sample size (150 or more in one job category.)
Criterion Related Validation Studies: This is another name for what was described above. Anytime you take test scores from a group of people, then correlate them with an outcome measure of some type (e.g., supervisor ratings, error rates, annual sales, etc.) then you are doing a criterion-related validation study.
First, our personality tests are designed for people who in the “job applicant” frame of mind. A “job applicant” often will try to figure out what the "“best” answer is and then pick it in order to present themselves in glowing terms. For example: “never late for meetings, work is always perfect, never get annoyed with people, always work hard”, etc. So, if you are responding to the inventory in a very “honest” frame of mind, your scores will be low.
Second, sometimes the better answer is on the left and sometimes it is on the right. When people are taking a personality just to get a feel for how it works and how the scores will turn out, sometimes they are not as careful as a real job applicant would be. Averaging in scores for a "wrong" answer here and there in the set of numbers will bring the overall score for that dimension way down.
Last, we are the first to admit that personality inventories are not perfect, but they are valid in most cases. Being a valid predictor means that they offer some value above and beyond the pre-existing hiring process. And, bear in mind that no predictor is perfect – even face-to-face interviews. The best example of that I give is a person's choice of marriage partner: we spend a tremendous amount of time getting to know a person before deciding to marry; but for about half the population, that choice / prediction turns out to be wrong! Hopefully our clients can use the information presented in a personality report as a general indicator of the type of person the candidate will turn out to be months and years down the pike.
A validation study generates evidence that the pre-employment tests you are using are good predictors of future job performance. When a testing program has been “validated” you have documented assurance that the information used to make hiring decisions is predictive of future job performance and is thus fair to job candidates.
Typically, a validation study includes:
* A job analysis.
* A rationale for tests used.
* Information on how employees or job candidates perform on the tests.
* A demonstrated relationship between test scores and some measure(s) of success on the job --usually supervisor ratings or other objective measures.
Sometimes YES. If the candidate must know specific things prior to being hired, the test should present questions about actual job content. For example, a bus driver should be a competent driver before being hired into the job.
Usually NO. In most jobs, people are given the opportunity to learn most aspects of the job during on-the-job training. In this case, it would be unfair (and possibly illegal) for a job candidate to be expected to know exactly the same things as a current employee. Therefore, aptitude tests for selection purposes are good predictors of whether the person would be quick to learn new job information, capable of using that knowledge to reason through problems in the job, and efficient in managing that type of information.
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