6 Steps to Selecting a Behavioral Assessment Tool

Parameters to be considered before selecting the behavioral assessment tool for your organization

Generally the only parameter that is given the most significance is cost of the assessment. This makes the companies pick up the cheapest option, under an assumption that all psychometric assessment tools are accurate and reliable. I would say, it is better not to have an assessment at all than to have one which gives misleading results. The latter is even more harmful for the organizations and for the psyche of the people.

Based on my experience of working in this field, I would say to check the accuracy of the assessment you need to take care of the following parameters while making the selection of the tool that will work best for you:

1.     Reliability of assessment: Reliability refers to the consistency or stability of a measure. If the concept being measured is assumed to be consistent, such as a personality trait, then the measure should yield similar results if the same person responds to it a number of times.

2.    Scientific Validity of assessment: While reliability refers to the consistency of a measure, validity refers to the accuracy of a measure. A measure is valid if it actually measures what it is supposed to measure.

You can ask for both reliability and validity scores from the company and if the assessment is genuine then companies are more than happy to share statistical studies with you as it separates them from low cost impostors in the field.

3. Technical Documentation: Review the technical documents / science behind the assessment. If the company is able to provide these to you then surely the assessment is not worth going for.

4.     Compliances: Check if the assessment complies with norms like EEOC, APA, SIOP etc.

5.    Try it for yourself: The true test of any pudding is in eating it. So do couple of trial test. This would give you the first hand feel of the assessment per-say and how easy is it to do. Secondly, you will be able to see how accurate and actionable is the information provided by the tool. Make sure the insights delivered by the tool is not only interesting but also impactful for your objective.

6.  Cost of the tool: Generally organizations only look at the cost of the assessment in isolation. Most of the psychometric test provides results that are so difficult to understand fully that organizations will invariably need to pay consultant to decipher it. This eventually costs much more to the organizations in totality. So look into the holistic cost model and not only per-assessment cost of the test.

The above mentioned steps should be the first few filters that you should use to sift good and reliable assessments from debris of unscientific tools.

To know more on Behavioral Assessment Tool. Visit tpsg.in/predictive-index

Vinaya Bansal

Workplace Talent Optimizer

vinaya@tpsg.in

www.tpsg.in