The Salad Analogy
Bear with me as I share a salad analogy for using pre-employment assessments in public sector organizations.
We cannot know when you’re reading this, but let’s assume you are at lunch today. Perhaps you went to a local grocery store, as I often do. Perhaps you went to the salad bar because you have been trying to be healthier. There are so many options. Olives look good, but so do the golden raisins. How can you incorporate walnuts into your salad? There are too many salad dressings, but none of them sound good. Ultimately, you’re left with a mishmash of various salad components and a strange lunch. Maybe you’ve always heard that eating salads is a great way to eat healthier and get some fiber into your diet, but you haven’t made the shift yet.
Are You Making Unhealthy Decisions?
If you’re stuck only using hiring interviews as part of your recruitment process, you may be making “unhealthy” decisions by hiring people that are not proven to possess the knowledge, skills, and abilities required for the job. When you find out they are not a good fit for the position, you’re stuck with wasted time, funds, and energy and another recruitment you must complete as soon as possible. By leveraging skills testing for these competencies before taking prospective candidates to a final interview, you will know that your entire finalist candidate pool is qualified to be considered for the position.
Word Gets Around
When a restaurant has a great meal, word gets around. As the hiring department, the collaboration and care you put into your recruitments will spread. Instead of being the department with the reputation of always saying no or putting up barriers to hiring a candidate, you can incorporate your managers and current incumbents into the process. By inviting the managers and employees who will work with this person most, they have input into the hiring process while you have control over how it is conducted. The candidates that are sent to your managers for selection will have passed the assessments that the managers themselves had a hand in creating. The managers will share the success in finding the right candidate from your new process.
A Better Way to Screen Candidates
Finding the time and expertise to create a new skills testing plan for your recruitment, job family, or entire testing library can be difficult. Like a strange salad, you may be mixing competencies into your assessment that are redundant or that are counter-intuitive to each other. After testing candidates with your assessment, you may find that it did not test for the most important competencies to the vacant position, leading you to try again, but with the same potential for failure and wasted time. Even worse, candidates may be using the same assessments year after year, to where they can pass your test from memory only, not demonstration of skill.
Trust a Professional
Why not trust a chef to ensure your salad is always beautifully executed, fresh, and never outdated? Much like a chef, having professional expertise to ensure your skills tests are cohesive, not only for the position you are testing but also in alignment with your other testing plans and the legal requirements specific to your industry.
Why Curated Examinations for Schools and Public Sector Organizations Are Better
Much like a kitchen, your ingredients, in other words, your skills or competencies, should be fresh and relevant to your menu, and your testing plan. They should be documented to prevent overuse within your internal library, and they should be studied within the assessments themselves as well. At baseline, your assessments should measure the competencies required to do the job. By working with an experienced organizational psychologist, your testing library is completely made to order, where the competencies you test for are appropriate and necessary, and your assessments are incredibly well-done.
HK Organizational Solutions has partnered with eSkill to provide curated examinations for schools and public sector organizations across the US. These curated examinations cover the position you’re hiring for, the job family, and your entire internal testing library.
HK Organizational Solutions has provided industry-specific assessments, validation services, and testing plan development since July 2020. Founder, Hannah Filley, holds a Master of Arts in Organizational Psychology and has been in the psychoanalytics and assessments field since 2016, working with academic, private, and public organizations. As a public education expert, she has assisted countless districts, counties, cities, and public organizations with their specific hiring needs since 2020.
How to Develop Your Own Internal Testing Library
Next time you find yourself overwhelmed with developing validated and effective assessments, or if you’re just overwhelmed at the salad bar, reach out to eSkill by requesting a demo. eSkill will connect you with Hannah to get professional guidance and assistance with the development of your own internal testing library, help with a few assessments or testing plans, or training for your staff to develop the right testing skills.