A guide for establishing the right assessments for your organization.
Too often, companies make the wrong decisions about what assessments to use. Typically, the decisions are based on marketing materials or what sales representatives tell them. Many companies choose not to use assessments or tests at all because the evaluation process is a daunting task. I am here to make it easy. My goal is to help you measure what you intend to; not to “sell” you assessments.
While the goal of using assessments in the selection process is to measure the quality of the candidate or as a tool in career development, an organization must be careful of using a commercially available assessment that does not meet legal guidelines. All companies using assessments must follow the Uniform Guidelines of Employee Selection Procedures (1978). This document is a uniform set of principles and standards for workplace testing and assessment. In addition to this standard, this criterion has been adopted by the EEOC, the Department of Labor, and the Department of Justice. The Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM) also recognizes the Uniform Guidelines procedure of 1978.
These documents state that it is the end user (the employer or test administrator) who could be held responsible for administering any assessment that does not meet these guidelines -not the assessment creator or the company you purchased the tool from. The end user must ensure that the assessment administered can be proven to meet the following criterion of psychometric soundness, which includes:
- Content, construct, and criterion validity standards
- Reliability standards
- The assessment must meet the employment context as it relates to a properly conducted job analysis and job description
- Must show statistical significance “at the 0.05 level of significance”
This criterion is designed to create fairness and to eliminate bias against protected classes. Currently, the testing and assessment industry has little to no enforcement on the millions of so-called “employment testing companies” that do not adhere to the very strict legal standards required to protect your organization. Most of the assessments in your Google search do not meet them.
The experts in psychometric tests and assessments are the practitioners of Industrial and Organizational psychology. We follow strict criteria, and we know what a good assessment is and is not. I recommend one of the following two options when choosing any psychometric test, assessment, or assessment battery.
- Read my Substack article on how to choose a quality assessment on your own.
- Fill out the form below, and allow my Broker Services to handle the task for you.
The mission is to provide you with a non-biased recommendation of selection and development tools that meet the above-mentioned criteria. Our Broker services will do the following work at no cost for you:
- Conduct a review of your current job description
- Shop the market of quality, peer-reviewed psychometrics that measure exactly what you intend to know about your candidate(s). This could be assessments of general mental intelligence, motivation, personality, problem solving, or any relevant construct of psychology.
- Send you a proposal to your email with the top publisher(s) and pricing information. Often, there will be several options with multiple publishers.
- I include samples (typically PDFs) of each assessment for your review.
- Most publishers offer discounts of 10 or more for buying “in bulk”.
Leverage my Assessment Broker Services to grow your human capital! I can often save companies as much as 70% even with the same publisher you may be using now! Simply upload your job description below, and I’ll go to work for you!