Behavioural assessment is the method in the psychology field to describe, explain, and sometimes to predict the behaviour of the individual. It can also be useful in educational, clinical and corporate settings.
Right from the generic personality traits and customer service orientation to the workplace style of thinking, learning capabilities, leadership capabilities, it helps to evaluate various aspects of candidates. These behavioural assessment tests are reliable and it allows the companies to hire the confidential candidates.
Days have gone where the companies hire the individuals based on their educational qualifications and also based on their work experience of the candidates. Everything from job market, work culture at the company or organization and the skills that are necessary to fit the job has undergone drastic change these days.
Apart from educational and technical knowledge, the candidate should possess the right attitude, problem solving ability, acclimate into the company’s culture and possess drive to success thought.
In the traditional method of assessment that includes one-to-one interview and also phone or face screening, it makes difficult to the recruiters to define the qualities of the individual earlier. Apart from these, employer retention time is the major factor that is faced by the companies these days. These can be solved with the behavioural assessments.
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Process of conducting behavioural assessment
The assessments ask specific questions that are towards the behaviour of the target. It further interested in behaviour samples and not the sign of internal processes.
Benefits of behavioural assessment
The assessment helps to look at the aspects of individuals goes to the work and steps he takes in achieving their objectives. It allows us to look at the positive behaviours that the person uses to finish the task among the two. Thus it serves as a useful tool for the recruiters.
The variety of behavioural methods flexibility is nothing but they can be used alone or in combination with other measures to create the entire picture of the individual entering into the company. Below are the benefits of the behavioural assessment:
- Reduce hiring mistakes
The process of recruitment is the tough job and costly, and making a mistake in this might lead to more costly. Behavioural assessment might help us in preventing the wrong hiring of an individual as that might lead to huge loss to the entire organization. The predictive validity helps in predicting job performance when carried out by knowledgeable individuals with right process. This helps in making the right decision whether it is related to development or in terms of selection process.
- Adverse impact
In terms of candidate reactions, the assessment is found to be better alternative method of traditional recruitment process. In other terms, it is less biased in terms of ethnicity, age and gender. The legal challenge of an assessment center outcome found to be only 2% when compared to the normal legal situations.
- Able to understand the behaviour of the candidate
During the interview, it is highly difficult to predict the person from the snapshot. Moreover, the persons resume doesn’t give the overall picture of the person. So it is necessary to get the bigger picture when it comes to the process of recruitment or interview. With many candidates coming into the sector, hiring with the right values and behaviours is necessary. There is always a saying: people are hired for what they know, but fired for who they are. This can be avoided through the behavioural assessment process.
- Get measureable results
Many organizations and companies face difficulty in quantifying human behaviour and their associated impact on the base line. Connecting the assessment results along with the recruitment results helps in deciding the core job performance, engagement and employee turnover, and also the commitment. This will be the job of the HR department in the organizations to transform business towards the critical function.
- Gives realistic job previews and employer branding
Unlike other recruitment process from the organizations, the assessment helps the candidate to know more about the company and allows him to engage in the role that aids self-selection. This shows the reflection in the role tasks and situations, interview questions that are relevant to the requirement of the candidate role, and allowing the process to feel more relevant and realistic. They are true when these assessments are bespoken to the organization.
- Utility
This is the simplest level as it is the comparison between the costs of the weighing process against the benefits. The main objective of the organization is to hire the individual performing the best and thus to create the most financial benefit to the organization while minimizing the financial cost of the assessment. This shows positive utility towards the behavioural assessment done. Further it shows positivity towards the number of contexts. The return of investment is 97% positive. While the alternative methods might have higher validities and involves less cost, the other benefits of the tests must also be considered while recruiting.
- Can make informed decisions and not the assumptions
The assessment enhances the level of standardization and objectivity to the standard recruitment process by allowing us in removing the unconscious bias that accompanies along with the selection process and decisions.
- Fake or managing impressions
There will always be a concern that is raised during the recruitment process such as personality tests, assessments or interviews in deciding whether the person is in a faking good or just managing to appear better in some way. The effects of impression management during the interviews results in the outcomes of the selection process to an extent. Spending longer time on interviews, unstructured ones, and details provided by applicants could reduce the interview evaluations.
Summary
The behavioural assessment has the highly valid potential and cost-effective predictors in terms of job performance. The assessment has gained lot of positive response from the participants as they are more relevant and fair when compared to other traditional recruitment process. The methods have the lower adverse impact than other forms and the candidates give more useful feedback.
