The New Science of Hiring

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Many testing companies today can do impressive comparisons of candidates against existing employees--the goal being to essentially clone top performers. "The assessments allow you to really identify what is different between our stars and our slugs," says James Hazen, an organizational psychologist and the owner of Applied Behavioral Insights, a consulting firm based in Wexford, Pennsylvania. Hazen uses several tests with his clients.

2,500 Number of cognitive and personality tests on the market

Assessments can turn up some fascinating findings. Dayton Freight Lines, a trucking company based in Dayton, Ohio, had been having trouble with drivers. Customers reported that some drivers were rude. Some drivers were complaining over their CB radios. Some workers' productivity was falling, or they were late on their deliveries. Denise Noel, the director of quality at Dayton Freight, was stumped. These drivers all had good qualifications and had interviewed well, yet she saw no way to predict who would be an outstanding performer on the road. Finally she brought in a company called Hogan Assessment Systems and had the company present its extensive research on truck drivers.

Noel had assumed all truck drivers were similar. But Hogan had found two distinct truck-driver profiles. The top city performers are social and gregarious, great with customers--which makes sense, because they pick up and drop off multiple times a day. The best line-haul drivers are quiet and introspective--which is good for people who never see a customer. Noel has adjusted her hiring now, having candidates take the Hogan assessment to find the best job for them. Turnover for drivers has fallen to 22 percent (the industry average is 116 percent). "You just think a driver is a driver, and that's not true," Noel says. "We just didn't look at that part of the hiring process enough."

Discussing the results of assessment tests with candidates--or even giving them the full report--is increasingly popular. "The trend has really been to lay it all on the table between the second and third interviews," says James Hazen. This gives candidates the chance to explain themselves, gives the interviewer a chance to address weak spots, and, if someone is hired, points out ways he or she might best be managed.

There are, by some estimates, 2,500 employment tests on the market. One of the biggest mistakes companies make is using the wrong test. A classic example is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, that ubiquitous test that sorts people into 16 personality categories. Myers-Briggs, a test created by a Pennsylvania woman who was fascinated by how her merry personality differed from that of her straightforward husband, has a weak record of predicting job success. Indeed, its publisher warns that "It is unethical and in many cases illegal to require job applicants to take the Indicator if the results will be used to screen out applicants."

With so many tests available, it's not a surprise that employers use tests meant for other purposes, like Myers-Briggs (which is fine, by the way, for employee development), or even design their own tests. But choosing the wrong one can mean dismissing qualified candidates and even getting sued for discrimination. Employers need to know whether a test is appropriate for hiring, what it measures, and how it's designed, along with making sure it's legal. Psychologists evaluate a psychological test by two measures, called reliability and validity. Reliability examines whether items that supposedly measure the same thing (agreeableness, say, or conscientiousness) correlate highly with one another. Validity asks, in this case, for proof that scores on tests are related to success in specific jobs. "If you go out on the Net and look at the hundreds of tests out there, a very small percentage have validity data," says Seymour Adler, a senior vice president at Aon Consulting and a teacher of organizational psychology at New York University.

Recent psychological research supports going beyond validity and reliability data. First, both for legal purposes and to ensure usefulness, make certain the test is designed for selecting--as distinct from developing or training--employees. It should be created or adapted for the workplace, not for clinical or medical diagnosis. Pre-employment tests are more predictive when they compare an individual's score against a group (they use "normative" scales, in the lexicon) instead of just presenting it on its own ("ipsative" scales). For the best results, too, employers should continue to evaluate and revalidate the tests within their companies to make sure they are still predicting top performers.

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