Behavioral Assessments

How Do Behavioral Assessments Help to Hire Great Employees?

HR leaders worldwide agree that skills tests are indispensable because when you have the right people in the right positions, everything operates smoothly, and things get done more efficiently. If a team started to work on a project that would take three years to complete, it would take them less than two years if managers replaced 20% of the average-performing team members with top talent and less than a year if the team members were 400% more productive than average.

Unfortunately, skills tests do not provide all the information hiring teams need to make good hiring decisions. A highly qualified candidate could be completely wrong for a job and a company’s corporate work environment and culture.

According to CareerBuilder, 74% of employers said they had hired an employee who was not a good fit for a job. Of these companies, 37% said it negatively impacted business productivity; 32% said they experienced time-to-market delays because they had to recruit and train another employee, and 31% said it compromised production quality. This is why many organizations use behavioral assessments in conjunction with skills tests.

What Is an Online Behavioral Assessment?

A behavioral assessment helps you evaluate a candidate’s personality and behavioral tendencies and make an unbiased comparison with other candidates. They are not meant to be diagnostic but are intended to be used to evaluate whether potential new hires are a good fit for the job and your company. They also reduce unconscious bias in your hiring process, when properly validated.

Behavioral assessment tools allow HR professionals to understand applicants’ personalities. They can evaluate how candidates think and approach problems, understand their communication styles, and predict how they will perform on the job. This helps them ensure candidates will be able to apply their skills and experience and function effectively in the company environment.

What is an Example of a Behavioral Test?

A behavioral assessment is a validated test used to examine a candidate’s personality traits and behavior patterns. They are popular with employers because they provide insights into prospective employees’ values, attitudes, emotions, and motivations. This helps HR teams determine whether a new hire will be a good fit for the job and company culture. With the eSkill Talent Assessment Platform^TM, you can measure attributes such as:

• Conscientiousness: Shows how thorough, organized, and careful an applicant will be.
• Extroversion: Measures how energetic, outgoing, and confident an applicant is.
• Integrity: Indicates whether an applicant is likely to adhere to and follow rules and policies.
• Work Ethic: Shows whether the prospective employee will do what is expected of them.
• Grit: Indicates whether the candidate will work diligently to meet goals and objectives.

What are the Types of Behavioral Assessments?

There are several types of behavioral assessments, and you and your hiring team need to decide which method is best for you. These are some common types of behavioral assessments:

• Personality Tests: A personality test analyzes a candidate’s traits, preferences, and behavioral tendencies and helps HR professionals determine whether they are a good fit for a job and corporate culture. Some examples include Meyers-Brigg, DISC, Enneagram, and Big 5 tests.
• Situational Judgment Tests: Situational Judgment Tests (SJTs) present candidates with job-related scenarios and ask them to choose the best and most appropriate course of action from a given set of options. They are a good method for assessing candidates’ critical thinking, problem-solving, decision-making skills, and ability to handle real-life work situations.
• Behavioral Interviews: A behavioral interview is a structured conversation that focuses on a candidate’s past behaviors and experiences. HR professionals ask applicants to provide specific examples of situations they have encountered and explain how they handled them. They can evaluate them against their needs and use them to indicate their future performance.
• Simulations: Simulations require candidates to complete projects that resemble tasks they will perform if hired. For example, a typical simulation could be a coding exercise if you needed to hire a computer programmer, a writing sample recruiting a technical writer, or a phone-based role-playing exercise recruiting customer service representatives.

How do Behavioral Assessments Help You Hire Great Employees?

You and your team probably receive thousands of responses when you post a job. This means you must screen all the applicants and identify those with the right skills, knowledge, and experience. Once you create a shortlist, you must determine which candidates best fit the job and your company culture.

Behavioral assessments help you predict employee performance by evaluating a candidate’s skills against those identified by a job analysis. This helps ensure you match the right person with the right job. According to the Society of Human Resources Management, leaders who use behavioral assessments can increase team performance by nearly 30%.

Behavioral assessments also help you improve employee retention. According to Gallup, replacing an employee costs about one-half to two times the employee’s annual salary. This means turnover and replacement costs for a 100-person company that pays employees an average salary of $50,000 could range from $660,000 to $2.6 million annually.

Onboarding and training are expensive. If an employee leaves voluntarily or does not work out, the company loses that investment and must incur additional costs to recruit, onboard, and train a replacement.

Poor job fit is the cause of 89% of hiring mistakes, and high turnover is one of the leading causes of reduced productivity. By evaluating a candidate’s potential fit, you can avoid putting the new hire and the rest of your team in an uncomfortable position and negatively impacting productivity.

The following story illustrates why including behavioral assessments in your hiring process is essential.

A Phoenix-based software company hired a lead engineer to manage a team of four Java developers. The company had a casual work environment. Employees wore shorts, jeans, t-shirts, and Birkenstocks—even senior managers and the CEO. Employees were allowed to work flexible schedules as long as they were in the office during core business hours, attended required meetings, and met their deadlines.

The new lead engineer had excellent technical skills but a very direct management style and was an autocratic leader who wanted his orders followed without question. After he had been on the job for three months, his team met with the CEO and threatened to quit.

HR leaders often ask, “How are behavioral assessments used in interviews?” This is a perfect example of how a big hiring mistake could have been prevented during the interview process.

The lead engineer had the required technical skills, but his management style clashed with the company’s laid-back culture. If the company had used behavioral assessments, the hiring team would have seen that his management style was incompatible with their corporate culture.

What are the 5 Characteristics of a Behavioral Assessment?

Hiring teams often fixate on hard skills like computer proficiency and math skills when they evaluate candidates to fill open positions. While hard skills are important, they should not overshadow the importance of soft skills that various behavioral assessments can measure.

By using skills tests with behavioral assessments, you can create a complete profile for each candidate and compare potential hires against one another using qualitative and quantitative data. These are five characteristics to look for.

• Determine Cultural Fit: When you make hiring decisions, you want new employees to become long-term, valuable members of your organization. Behavior and temperament determine how well a candidate will assimilate within an organization and if their ethics and values align with your company’s mission and principles. You can provide employees with the resources and tools they need to do their jobs, but you cannot teach someone to align with your cultural values. Therefore, it is critical to identify candidates with compatible values, attitudes, and priorities.
• Predict Future Performance: The best way to judge a candidate’s future job performance is to evaluate their personality, cognitive ability, and interests. All types of behavioral assessments help you predict long-term performance since they measure traits like emotional intelligence, cognitive skills, and temperament, which remain relatively stable throughout a person’s life. eSkill’s cognitive and behavioral assessment tests are reliable and valid indicators of the likelihood that employees will be successful.
• Decrease Time-to-Hire: According to the Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM), filling an open position takes an average of 36 days. And as most HR leaders will attest, the hiring process can be time-consuming and costly. eSkill clients can improve hiring outcomes by using data gathered using skills and behavioral tests. Behavioral and skills assessments enable you to review and compare candidates’ results instantly. This will ensure you make the best hiring decisions and increase the likelihood that employees will stay with your company.
• Find Candidates with Specific Traits: Most employees perform better when like-minded individuals surround them and are in an environment where they feel comfortable. Behavioral assessments help you build a team that works well together based on preferred personality traits, temperament, and interests. When Herb Brooks selected players for the 1980 U.S. Hockey Team, he did not choose the best players. He selected the “right” players to form the best team. They had grit, problem-solving, and physical skill. His strategy paid off because his team defied all odds and won the gold medal at the 1980 Winter Olympics.
• Improve Employee Development: The insights behavioral assessments provide about prospective new hires can help you increase retention rates. Sharing results with managers and team leaders can help them determine how to coach team members and provide feedback. Managers can personalize their style and approach to communicate with employees effectively and better connect with all their team members.

eSkill Makes Behavioral Assessments Easy

Making behavioral assessments a part of your hiring process is easy with the eSkill Talent Assessment Platform^TM.  You can manually invite candidates to complete tests or automate the process and send a test link to all applicants.

With eSkill’s easy-to-use dashboard, all your assessment data is at your fingertips. Results are automatically reported when applicants complete tests, and you can easily sort candidates by test score. You can also run reports to see candidates’ assessment results in more detail to see which questions they missed and determine strong and weak areas.

When it comes to hiring the best-qualified candidate, the eSkill Talent Assessment Platform^TM gives you a thorough assessment of candidates’ skills, abilities, and personalities. By using skills tests and behavioral assessments, you can quickly identify which candidates have the required skills and determine which ones are the right fit for the job and your company.

Get Started with Behavioral Assessments

Adding behavioral assessments to your hiring process can help you predict how well a candidate will perform in their new role. Since behavioral assessments are customized to match each job, you can identify candidates with the highest probability of success.

Even if an employee has the right technical skills, they may not succeed if their behavioral assessment shows they would be a poor fit for your current environment.  Behavioral assessments help you avoid hiring mistakes that could negatively impact productivity, disrupt team synergy, and have repercussions that last well beyond the new hire period.

Behavioral assessment tests help HR teams improve hiring outcomes while reducing hiring expenses and decreasing time-to-hire. Many eSkill clients have cut hiring costs by around 70% and time-to-hire by about 60%.

Do you want to learn how eSkill’s behavioral assessments can help you improve hiring outcomes across your organization? Request a demo today.