The concept of Employee Lifetime Value (ELV) has been all over the news in recent months as organizations aim to better understand the value and financial impact of longer-term employee relationships. As it was underscored for many companies in this last year, employees with institutional knowledge and emotional investment are willing and able to do what it takes to step up to keep the business running in tumultuous times. We can expect to see more organizations concentrate on keeping employees with them longer in our working future. That strategy starts with effective assessments.
What does effectiveness mean in pre-employment assessments?
Effective assessments help recruiting teams get qualified candidates to work faster. End of story. Or is it? At Modern Hire, we believe that for pre-employment assessments to be an effective technology tool for helping recruiting teams meet their stated goals, they must meet the following criteria:
Effective assessments should be tied to measurable outcomes. Whether an organization is striving to improve new hire productivity, reduce turnover, increase diversity hiring, or all of the above, the TA team needs to relate their pre-employment assessments to those goals to see progress – or lack thereof and make the right adjustments. Modern Hire customizes a pre-employment assessment called Virtual Job Tryout™ to an organization’s business goals with measurable results. We use an active feedback loop to relate post-hire success measures with pre-hire assessment data to keep the assessments aligned with post-hire success. This also gives recruiting teams an economic measure of the value of each new hire. Read how effective assessments helped a Modern Hire client make a 17% gain in productivity and save $5.5M by retaining new hires in its freight handling division.
Effective assessments should be adaptable to support all hiring needs. In this past year, recruiting teams were asked to respond to changing hiring needs quickly. New skills were needed, new roles were created, and this need for lightning-speed change could easily continue. To be effective, assessments must be adaptable to enable recruiters to tailor their process to the positions they need to fill. They also need to allow for speedy development of assessments for emerging roles, such as Telehealth Professional, so that recruiters can understand a candidate’s future performance even if they’ve never done that job before.
Effective assessments optimize advanced technology. Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) techniques enable data analysis at deeper levels than ever before. In the context of pre-hire assessments, AI allows a more effective prediction of a candidate’s future performance on the job. Here’s the critical difference: Traditional assessments identify linear patterns in data; AI-powered assessments make sense of more complex, non-linear patterns in data. With these additional data points, humans can make more informed decisions about the job’s best candidates. Modern Hire has integrated these AI advantages and the discipline and principles of industrial-organizational psychology (I-O) in CognitIOn by Modern Hire™, the deepest, broadest talent intelligence available for hiring. CognitIOn is inside Modern Hire pre-employment assessments to ensure recruiting teams can optimize their understanding and measurement of candidate performance.
Effective assessments benefit the individual as well as the organization. Some people are skeptical about the use of AI in assessments, and with good reason. Our society has already seen AI be misapplied in hiring many ways, with damaging outcomes for candidates. At Modern Hire, we begin all work with AI, including pre-employment assessments, with a human-first approach. In fact, one of our standards for the ethical application of AI is that AI hiring products must be beneficial for organizations and individuals. To take this a step further, effective assessments should benefit candidates in many ways, from ensuring the AI used is free of bias to improve candidates’ hiring experience.
One of the most impactful ways is ensuring superior job matches. Modern Hire pre-employment assessments are proven to identify those candidates who will succeed in the job they are applying for and those who present a high turnover risk. At the same time, a Virtual Job Tryouts allows candidates to experience their potential future through job simulations and realistic job previews. Effective pre-employment assessments help organizations make more informed decisions about extending job offers and help individual candidates make more informed decisions about accepting a job offer.
For many recruiters, seeing new hires thrive in their new jobs is very rewarding, perhaps even more so when their recruits become engaged employees. In these cases, ELV can grow exponentially. In the modern world, where recruiters have large talent pools to select from, and candidates can pursue virtual jobs almost anywhere around the globe, effective pre-employment assessments can be the springboard for employer-employee relationships that last.