Pre-employment assessments provide an accurate indicator of job-fit and future job performance because of their reliability, validity, and fairness. When hiring managers use high quality Pre-employment assessments USA to help guide their hiring decisions they can expect to hire high performers consistently. We define consistently as 75 percent of the time (3 out of 4 new hires). A pre-employment assessment USA is considered high quality if it is reliable, valid, and fair.
A reliable assessment should provide results that are similar no matter when it is completed. A reliable assessment will provide consistent scores. Test manuals will usually provide a reliability coefficient, giving you an indication of the test’s reliability. The higher the reliability coefficient, the more confidence you can have that the score is accurate. Here are some general guidelines for interpreting reliability coefficients:
.90 or higher - excellent
.80 to .89 - good
.70 to .79 - adequate
.69 or lower - may have limited usefulness
Validity is the most important issue in selecting a high quality pre-employment assessments. There are different types of validity and we discuss them briefly below:
We can call an assessment face valid if the items on the assessment seem to be aligned with its purpose. Think of it as face value, where you can observe the questions asked to observe their relevance to what is being measured. In the case of a pre-employment assessment, face validity is a subjective impression of the assessment.
Content validity means that only items relevant to job-related behavior are used in the assessment. A personality assessment should cover areas such as openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism (The Big Five) to determine a candidate’s degree of fit for the job.
All the other types of validity described above can be seen as forms of evidence for construct validity. Think of it as building a case – the more evidence you have, the more confident you can be to prove your assessment is accurate. Construct validity is the degree to which an assessment measures what it claims, or purports, to be measuring.
The main question we need to answer when we deal with criterion-related validity is whether the assessment results correlate to external criteria like job performance. In other words, individuals who score high on the assessment perform better on the job than those who score low. Our job is to make sure that the correlation between the two are high. Predictive validity is the extent to which a score on a scale predicts scores on some criterion measure like supervisor performance ratings, sales performance or tenure. The test manual usually provides a validity coefficient that will show the assessment’s validity for a specific purpose. Here are some general guidelines for interpreting validity coefficients:
.35 or higher - very useful
.21 to .34 - likely to be useful
.12 to .20 - depends on circumstances
.11 or lower - unlikely to be useful
Establishing a fair and unbiased pre-employment assessment process helps employers avoid adverse impact, but it doesn't guarantee that adverse impact won't occur. Establishing that your assessments are fair and unbiased are both important, but you must still play an active role in ensuring that adverse impact is not occurring. Adverse impact refers to employment practices that appear neutral but have a discriminatory effect on a protected group. Adverse impact may occur in hiring, promotion, training and development, transfer, layoff, and even performance appraisals.
Contact us if you have questions about the reliability, validity or fairness of any pre-employment assessments USA you are using.
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