When you’re being marketed by a pre-employment assessment vendor, keep the four V’s in mind – Vision, Validity, Verification, and Value.

Many businesses approach us on a regular basis, inquiring about the best prehire assessment. The findings back up the increased demand for pre-employment screenings. 82 percent of firms use some type of pre-employment assessment test, according to the Talent Board’s 2016 North American Candidate Experience research report.

We frequently respond to the topic of which exam is the best by saying, “What makes you want to use an assessment? What exactly are you attempting to achieve?”

Making better hires isn’t a clear enough aim on its own. There are various assessment instruments designed specifically to measure constructs that can directly impact these, and countless other organizational issues or goals, whether you’re trying to impact staff retention, sales volume, early hire failure rate, employee engagement, productivity, theft, absenteeism, or drug use in the workplace.

Using the four V’s, you’ll be able to figure out how to best integrate data from evaluation tools that are directly related to the most critical business goals.

Vision

Organizations don’t think about why they want to evaluate candidates enough. Consider why you’re utilizing a certain tool more carefully. Is it because it’s cheap and easy, or because everyone else does it, or are we being clear about what we’re trying to do in the organization and utilizing screening methods that support that?

Because different types of technologies lend themselves to solving different problems, the goal must be granular. Once you know what you want to achieve, you can figure out what you can measure to assist you forecast the exact outcome you want.

Validity

The predictive validity—the capacity to predict work performance—of various hiring exams has been studied extensively, and some are better predictors than others. Interviews, reference checks, four-quadrant personality assessments, and emotional intelligence tests are among the least predictive metrics used by employers, she added.

According to the study, assessments with higher validity include mental ability tests, integrity tests, and multimeasure tests, which include a number of measurements. The single best indicator of job performance is mental ability, and many people struggle with it. This type of test can also have unfavorable consequences. As a result, you must be clear about why you’re assessing mental ability and how it relates to the outcomes you want to enhance.”

Combining these tests with complementary measurements to get a more complete picture of the person, and applying the tests later in the recruiting process to reduce the possibility of negative consequences.

Employers’ favorite type of employee assessment takes into consideration mental ability, social skills, personality, work values, and motives. Because recruiting is such a high-stakes situation, these test findings be used to predict performance in employees and candidates vying for a specific role.

Verification

You still have to shop among the thousands of suppliers in the marketplace once you’ve decided what you want to achieve and what types of assessments with a high degree of validity will help you get there. If you’ve ever sat through a sales pitch, you’ve probably experienced the agony of hearing vendors disparage their competitors and claim that their test is the best.

Test publishers should be ready to produce mountains of data demonstrating how meticulously their products were developed. Any pre-employment testing must be reliable in terms of internal consistency and retest reliability, which refers to the possibility that the results will be the same as the first time the test is administered.

It’s not as simple as creating a short, mobile-friendly quiz with only three or four validation studies with a few hundred people for tests to be truly predictive of individual performance and business outcomes; it’s not as simple as creating a short, mobile-friendly quiz with only three or four validation studies with a few hundred people for tests to be truly predictive of individual performance and business outcomes. Personality testing, in particular, needs to be normed over time, with a significant enough amount of data collected to be able to claim with certainty that certain personality qualities predict specific performance.

Value

The final stage is to show that the use of a certain test is statistically connected with the outcome you’re seeking to predict through validation studies. In other words, as test scores rise, so does turnover, or as test scores rise, so does productivity.