HR teams risk recruiting the wrong people or developing the wrong competencies in their organisation if they don’t check and verify whether the assessments they use to select and develop staff are adding value, warns assessment specialist cut-e.
The company has published a new guide – called How to conduct a validation study – which explains the pros and cons of different types of verification studies and provides step-by-step recommendations on best practice for HR teams. It offers advice on defining ‘performance’; choosing the right criteria, metrics and sample size; matching assessment data with appropriate performance data and how to interpret the findings.
“Conducting a validation study will help you to recruit the right people, develop the right competencies and make better and more confident talent decisions, as you can investigate the correlations between your assessment results and actual performance data,” said Dr Katharina Lochner, Research Director at cut-e Group. “Armed with these insights, you can build a model of the traits and abilities that will predict the future behaviour of your talent. For example, you can look at someone’s actual on-the-job performance and see how accurately their scores on an assessment test or questionnaire predicted that.”
According to the guide, assessment data can be correlated against performance outcomes, such as sales success or manager ratings, and against other outcomes such as job satisfaction, attrition or absenteeism. Deciding on the criteria to use is often the biggest challenge.
The guide also offers advice on how to present validation insights, in an easy-to-understand format, to the senior team and to recruiters and hiring managers throughout the business.
How to conduct a validation study: Guidelines for best practice in assessment validity can be freely downloaded at cut-e.
