Should You Make Your Candidates Take Tests?

by: Steven Haug, PhD

At ECA Partners, we notice that clients often use a variety of tests and assessments to evaluate candidates, and they have plenty to choose from. Some are technology assessments, which test a candidate’s ability to navigate simple tasks on a computer (like minimizing a window), others are additional phone conversations with third-party professionals trained to evaluate behavioral qualities.

Here are two considerations for when you are leveraging assessments as part of your hiring process:

To Use Them Well, Assessments Require Time and Resources
Impact on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

To Use Them Well, Assessments Require Time and Resources

It is expected that whoever is selling you the assessments will have run tests on the questions or methods they use, or have significant research to back up their claims. However, to use assessments effectively, you’ll have to continually test them. The worry with assessments is that they may weed out viable or even strong candidates, and if you are using assessments to filter candidates, you may never even see the resumes of your strongest applicants. The only way to know if this is the case for your candidates is to establish and measure success. Test the assessments by hiring candidates that passed the assessments as well as candidates that failed the assessments (but performed well in the interview process otherwise). Then, after you have a large enough sample size, see if the assessments selected for high performers, or if the candidates if both groups performed equally well.

When running a test like this, there are plenty of variables that are difficult to account for and it’s not likely that these methods would meet peer-reviewed standards, but if your sample size is large enough, you’ll have a good idea of whether the assessments are worth what you are paying for them.

Impact on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

Often, standardized tests are argued to select against minority groups. This can impact the diversity in the office because, by the time a candidate applies for your job opening, they likely have taken several of these exams.

Job-specific assessments have the potential to allow hiring managers to rely less on pedigree and therefore less on previous tests the candidate has taken.

If you are confident your assessment will select candidates with attributes that will allow them to be successful on the job, you can forgo screening candidates for things like college major, top-tier universities, MBB experience, etc. This will expand your candidate pool and can be a step toward overcoming and potential biases in other tests your candidates have taken.