1. Your Hires Aren’t Getting Any Better

If you invest in a lengthy, expensive assessment, you need to make sure that investment pays off.

Every assessment has a goal. Some work to predict overall job success by measuring job-related skills and attributes. Others work by predicting the likelihood of turnover. Still others attempt to determine which candidates are most likely to commit theft.

If your assessment isn’t hitting your target key performance indicators (KPIs), it’s clearly time to rethink it. That said, the blame may not lie with the assessment itself; the delivery mechanism may instead be at fault.

2. Your Assessment Has High Dropout Rates

While your assessment might be doing its job to screen out the worst performers, it may also be screening out those who didn’t complete the entire assessment. Many companies feel this is a good thing: After all, if a candidate won’t spend the time to do the assessment, they probably wouldn’t be a good employee anyway. This assumption is a fair indicator of an applicants basic personality. If they can’t be bothered to complete an assessment, odds are they will not be a good fit for your company culture anyway.

Having an assessment battery that asks the most up-to-date and relevant questions pertaining to an applicant definitely helps improve dropout rates. Applicants are more likely to complete an assessment if the testing platform is technologically up-to-date and creates a seamless linear process for them to sail through. Many existing platforms are cumbersome and require multiple steps, stop & starts, and make the assessment experience a more arduous process than it needs to be. Consequently, Klein Behavioral Science Assessments aim to help mitigate the number of dropouts with a better assessment experience for applicants.

3. Your Assessment Takes Forever to Update

Most jobs evolve rapidly. New tools and tech emerge on a daily basis. When such developments arise, they make some competencies obsolete.

For example, bank tellers of the 1960s were largely evaluated on their ability to quickly count change for clients, a task requiring incredible finger dexterity and fine motor skill precision. With the widespread deployment of the ATM in the 1970s, this skill became obsolete. As a result, tellers took on a more advisory role, meaning assessments of manual dexterity were no longer valid predictors of performance.

The U.S. government estimates 47 percent of today’s jobs may be threatened by technology. There is good reason to believe, as in the case of the bank teller, that these jobs will evolve rather than be lost altogether. There’s also little doubt that the critical KPIs of these roles will undergo serious change.

Building a valid predictive assessment is a time-consuming process. However, allowing those assessments to go without updates for lengthy periods of time means hiring decisions are being made based on irrelevant data. If the rate of work transformation plays out like it’s expected to, the traditional assessment revision process will not be able to keep up.

Your assessments need to be “futureproof.” If they aren’t, it might be time to rethink your assessment strategy.

4. You’re Investing Heavily in Employer Branding and Candidate Experience

Have you ever built a computer or prepared for a marathon? These situations might seem entirely unrelated, but consider their similarities: If a computer has a lightning-fast hard drive, graphics card, and RAM, but a slow processor, the whole system will be slow. Similarly, if a runner tones and conditions their legs with high-repetition exercises but does no aerobic work, they will quickly find themselves out of breath on the track.

Both situations are perfect examples of a bottleneck: a single point of blockage that affects the performance of the overall system.

Now, think about the Holy Grail of candidate experiences. Its key components might include:

• custom branded videos introducing candidates to your organization and providing day-in-the-life glimpses of your office;
• convenient screening methods that prioritize the candidate’s time;
• and short applications that return helpful feedback in a timely manner.

If you’ve put the time, energy, and investment into a phenomenal candidate experience, the last thing you want to do is bottleneck it — which an inefficient assessment can easily do. If your assessment doesn’t reflect your brand or provides a terrible experience for the candidate, you might need to rethink your strategy.

5. Your Assessment Isn’t Mobile-Optimized

The rest of the hiring process has gone mobile. According to Talent Board’s 2016 Candidate Experience Research Report, 79 percent of employers now offer mobile-optimized applications, a more than fourfold increase from 2015 (18 percent). This huge leap illustrates how mission-critical a mobile-ready hiring process is.

Since assessments are generally considered the realm of industrial-organizational psychologists rather than talent acquisition professionals, they often lag behind other steps of the hiring process when it comes to adopting the latest trends. If your candidates can fill out their applications on mobile but have to jump to computers to complete assessments, that’s a recipe for a bad candidate experience.