Should You Be Using Assessments To Drive Innovation In Your Organisation?

Technology is transforming every aspect of our daily lives, and it’s no different when it comes to how organisations serve customers, how workers work and how people consume information. Businesses must become more innovative in order to keep pace with these changes, and hiring the right talent at the right time is a crucial element of this.

At ManpowerGroup, we interact with over 10 million individuals across the globe every year. We believe that assessments and data can help us to predict workforce needs, what employees want and individuals’ future performance, helping us to make better matches to meaningful work.

We’re not alone in this opinion. Recent research shows that about 76% of organisations with more than 100 employees now rely on assessment tools ranging from aptitude to personality tests for external hiring. That figure is expected to climb to 88% over the next few years. And assessments aren’t just used for screening junior recruits. Global research estimates suggest that tests are used for 72% of middle management positions and up to 80% of senior roles, compared with 59% of entry-level positions.

The evidence highlights that assessments aren’t just the latest HR trend. Taking a structured interview approach increases the likelihood of hiring a good fit to 50 percent. Add an assessment to the process, and the odds increase to 80 percent. They can significantly reduce the time and cost of recruiting and hiring. When assessments are well designed, they can also help to reduce bias and increase diversity – something which has also been shown to increase innovation in organisations.

Whilst it’s easy to embellish experience and capability in an interview or on a CV, there is no easy way to game well-designed assessment tools. Companies use them to identify people with the traits and skills required for a particular job, and new hires who misrepresent themselves are quickly uncovered.

In order for organisations to increase innovation, businesses should use assessments to measure three critical elements of success in an individual: competence, work ethic, and emotional intelligence. Whilst hiring managers can still get a high-level understanding of someone’s capabilities in these areas through CV’s, interviews, and references, assessments provide them with a clearer picture – rather than just focusing on past experience.

When it comes to assessing potential leaders for your organisation, ManpowerGroup’s P3 leader model looks at people, purpose and performance. It reflects the key ingredients organisations need to drive leader effectiveness in uncertain and dynamic markets. The P3 leader model provides organisations with an efficient system to guide the selection and development of leaders. It offers a framework to measure their impact on individual employees and the organisation as a whole, focusing on three components: business outcomes, inherent enablers, and coachable capabilities.

As a people and technology-led company, our industry leading global footprint and extensive workforce expertise means that we are best placed to create value for our clients by open-sourcing, incubating, piloting and developing innovative solutions that address our clients’ workforce challenges. Combining our workforce analytics and research and testing of HR technologies, we provide our clients with best-in-class, scalable solutions for today and the future. If you’d like to find out more about how we can help your organisation, get in touch today.