Your company wants to find better employees for key positions. Given the nature of the positions and your difficulty in hiring and/or retaining the right people, you (or your manager, or someone else's manager) decides that you need some kind of additional screening tool. You know, like a test. Or a special interview. Or something. A few words on this before we delve into selection system/selection assessment validation: far too many HR people, HR directors, hiring managers, and company executives come to this conclusion for several wrong reasons. Some executives operate under the delusion that developing and implementing a test will be quick and easy, because other companies have done it and because so many companies offer assessment services. Almost without exception, these people are completely wrong. Such sentiments only reveal a profound ignorance of how employment testing is legally developed and used.
Others mistakenly believe that tests will act as a "get-out-of-managing-my-employees-free" card, even if they won't admit it publicly. They blame every failed hire on Human Resources, no matter how negligent they are at maintaining a healthy work atmosphere, providing feedback, nurturing their talent, developing their staff, and getting rid of the people who negatively impact their area.
If you work at a company where such sentiments go unchallenged and commonplace, run far far far far far far far away. You'll be better off not working there.
But let's say you're either stuck in the role of having to develop and implement tests and you don't have a strong background in assessment development, or you're lucky enough to have managers that are open-minded enough to accept the principles we advocate here. In that case, Renegade Psychology can help.
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Hopefully, you've completed a solid job analysis. On the basis of that analysis, you either create or buy a test. This, you assume, will definitely improve the quality of people who you hire.
Not so fast. Are you SURE you want to create a test? Do you have the time and money to create a test from scratch? You'll need to grab current employees working those jobs, involving them in the process of developing your test. You didn't think those custom assessment questions/items you wanted were going to write themselves, did you? Do your employees have the time? Will their managers agree to let them participate?
Let's say you're getting something off the shelf. Did you create a realistically sustainable testing plan first? Who will be administering all these tests? Can you trust the administrators? How will you store the test data securely? Who will have access to the records? How will the tests be scored? What will your re-test policy be? Does the hiring department buy into the test and the question format?
No doubt the test vendor will have a lot of data to back up how awesome and amazing their test is. They will claim to have a lot of 'validation' evidence to back up the quality of their test.
Wait a minute. Validation? What's that?
Good question! It's the standard required for any company employing more than 15 people to legally use ANY selection assessment. And just so we're clear, 'selection assessment' means 'any instrument used to make hiring or promotion decisions.' That includes interviews, in case you were still fuzzy.
If you develop a selection instrument but fail to validate it, your organization exposes itself to potential lawsuits. Any disgruntled candidate with an ax to grind can claim your test or interview was unfair to them. They can gather other disgruntled rejected candidates and training washouts to accuse you of discrimination or of requiring unfair tests for selection and promotion.
And you won't have any data to defend yourself with, because you didn't follow the Uniform Guidelines and gather SPECIFIC and LOCAL validation data to justify the use of your test. Just like that, your test is toast: all that time and money down the drain.
To avoid this, you need to validate your tests. There are industry-standard and court-accepted ways to accomplish this. But before we get into the ways and means, Renegade Psychology will explain when NOT to use assessment tests.