I read Perfect Score = Perfect Job? a few days ago on Forbes.com and am catching up to comment on it now. It is a good read with many excellent points in support of assessments. I previously posted about an article that discussed the ability of candidates to refuse to take the assessments. This article goes a long ways in articulating the purpose and results of effective, validated assessments.
…the process benefits both sides by matching the employer’s needs with the candidate’s skills and interests.
To put a sharper point on it, assessments measure the candidate’s skills, aptitudes, style and motivations to the specific needs of the position for which they are applying. Again, I cannot understand why a candidate would not want to discover if their abilities are a strong fit for this position. A desire to avoid that discovery seems quite disingenuous to me.
The article descends into a theoretical discussion due to the misguided focus on one particular word:
But this raises a few basic questions: What is personality? Can it be measured? If so, can it be reduced to a score? Does personality relate to job performance? If so, how?
The short answer is: Who knows? But many employers find such testing helpful and use it as one part of the hiring process.
Assessments that focus solely upon personality are quite limited in their results. Our focus is directed towards communication which speaks to personality in a limited scope. However, no one will argue that communication is not important in the workplace. Communication style does relate directly to job performance. We measure a candidate’s communication style but weight it as the least of our different assessments (hence its placement above the water line in our assessment graphic).