Focusing solely on qualifications and expertise leads to overlooking candidates brimming with potential. A recent article by Harvard Business Review stated that broadening the talent search by looking beyond advanced degrees is vital to compete in this new talent market.

The solution: adding behavioral assessments into your recruitment strategy — a new framework letting you measure qualities that make candidates great for roles.

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Article Roadmap

• What Are Behavioral Assessments?
• What Do Behavioral Assessments Measure?
• Uses in the Workplace
• Importance
• Assessment Types
• Process
• How Software Can Help
• The Wrap-up

What Are Behavioral Assessments?

Behavioral assessment tools are psychometric evaluations that measure behavioral patterns and competencies in a work-related setting to improve hiring success. Candidates answer qualitative questions that elicit authentic responses. Test results assist with decisions throughout the employee life cycle.

Behavioral Assessments vs. Pre-employment Assessments

Every business defines success differently. So, when it comes to talent selection, your ideal candidate is someone who can keep up with your company’s rhythm and contributes to your unique human capital management (HCM) goals.

While pre-employment assessment tools answer which candidates have the expertise to do the job, behavioral evaluations help determine their work performance. Essentially, there are three key differences between the two methods:

• Scientific Validation: An essential element of behavioral tests relies on well-researched psychometric frameworks tailored to work settings. Pre-hire assessments determine if your potential hire qualifies for the job, and behavioral evaluations uncover if they have the right attitudes and habits for the job.
• Qualitative Approach: Potential hires may have the technical know-how for a specific job, but can they acclimatize in a defined work environment? Behavioral evaluations focus on candidates’ characteristics and qualities instead of their professional journeys. That way, you evaluate potential hires’ compatibility with your people and culture.
• Wider Scope: Pre-employment assessments are vital tools for narrowing down qualified candidates during talent screening. However, behavioral insights are useful in the hiring process and beyond.

Behavioral Assessments vs. Talent Assessments

Behavioral and talent assessments share a lot in common. Both assessment types are vital to look at the bigger picture. However, there are a few subtle differences between the two:

1. No wrong answers: True to their name, behavioral assessments evaluate applicants’ past and present behaviors to determine natural tendencies. On the other hand, talent assessment scores are straightforward and easier to calculate; higher scores or ratings mean a better fit.
2. Broad Spectrum: Behavioral assessments identify where candidates fall on a diverse personality spectrum. Talent assessments measure candidates’ alignment with desired qualities needed for role-based success.
3. Standardized questions: Behavioral assessments administer standardized questionnaires to every candidate. At the same time, talent assessments use customized questionnaires to determine a potential hire’s capabilities in a defined capacity.

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What Do Behavioral Assessments Measure?

Each position has different requirements, and assessing attributes will help you identify whether values match. There are no right or wrong answers, only insights that align the right person to the right role.

Behavioral evaluations don’t categorize qualities as good or bad. Instead, they analyze the degree of personality traits and behavioral competencies.

For example, an individual can adhere to internal processes well, while another candidate is creative and more likely to adapt to a dynamic environment. Both are good qualities and vital for different roles.

Typically, assessments measure the following attributes:

• Personality Traits
• Situational Judgment
• Problem-Solving Aptitude
• Cognitive Abilities
• Workplace Motivators

Uses in the Workplace

The good news is that personality, and behavioral tests will always be useful, provided you pair them up with your recruiting KPIs and other candidate evaluation methods. Incorporating your company-specific hiring and performance benchmarks into the mix lets you collect rich insights capable of unlocking a broad range of functions:

• Recruitment: Leverage individualistic insights to conduct personalized competency-based interviews and gain an accurate representation of candidates’ ability to fit into a role.
• Learning and Development: Create development plans based on your employees’ strengths and weaknesses.
• Succession Planning: Identify and track potential leaders by aligning behavioral traits with leadership qualities.

Importance

Past behavior is the best predictor of future performance. Keep reading to discover how an in-depth understanding of your candidates’ habits and tendencies will help you make data-driven hiring decisions.

Reduce Bad Hires

Bad hires aren’t just employees who leave a trail of chaos in your organization. Sometimes bad hires occur when you place decent folks for the wrong jobs. A poor fit can lead to problems like skyrocketing recruitment costs, disrupted workflows, dips in productivity and, worst case scenario, lawsuits.

Behavioral insights capture snapshots of future tendencies. Determining the temperaments, emotional intelligence levels and attitudes of each candidate arms you with insights needed to spot red flags and dodge bullets early in the process.

Predict Job Performance

Behavioral tests help you take the guesswork out of talent selection. Your applicants react and adapt to specific situations differently. Knowing how each candidate responds to different management and work styles will help you uncover good matches from unsuitable ones.

Knowing your potential hires’ natural thinking tendencies will help you place them in roles they can excel in, assign responsibilities they can take on and build a support system conducive to their growth.

Address the Talent Market

Recent U.S. Chamber of Commerce findings show that 2.8 million workers are missing from the workforce. Talent is fleeting, and the same research found that retirements, tax benefits and stimulus checks are the driving forces.

However, the good news is that a new and young demographic is entering the talent market. Understanding and leveraging what drives these new job seekers is vital to acquiring them before your competition. Behavioral evaluations let you position your recruitment strategy from simply filling vacancies to engaging and retaining quality hires in modern times.

Hire for Culture Add

In the quest to find the best match for open roles, businesses tend to use a templated approach during the talent screening process and select candidates who fit the mold.

But every candidate is different, and treating them like puzzle pieces is reductive. Knowing where values don’t align is vital to bringing fresh perspectives into your team. Leveraging behavioral tests will help you acknowledge the differences between all your candidates.

Give Value Back

Expecting your employees and future hires to be grateful to have a job is a thing of the past. Today, impacting your future and present hires is essential in this value-driven talent market.

Behavioral tests are also interesting to your candidates since they provide an in-depth understanding of strengths and weaknesses they might need to know from the start. Share results with your future and existing employees and start ongoing conversations about their impact on the organization.

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Assessments Types

Behavioral assessments rely on scientifically validated frameworks tailored to measure work environments. Some of the most popular scientifically-researched assessments are:

The 16-Type Personality Test

The 16-type personality test presents questions to determine how candidates perceive information and how these perceptions affect their decisions. This self-evaluation encourages candidates to select options that best describe what motivates them.

The framework then categorizes responses based on four personality dimensions:

• Introversion (I) or Extraversion (E)
• Intuition (N) or Sensing (S)
• Feeling (F) or Thinking (T)
• Judging (J) or Perceiving (P)

The questionnaire presents statements and scenarios with multiple choices allowing candidates to select the response they relate to the most.

The test results group every candidate into one of the 16 personality types. Each category is a four-letter combination of the above-mentioned dominant traits.

The Big Five Personality Test

The Big Five Personality test, also called the OCEAN test, does exactly what it claims: assess candidates based on five distinct qualities. OCEAN is an acronym for the following factors:

• Openness: Candidates who showcase this trait are more likely to be creative, inventive and willing to learn new things.
• Conscientiousness: Candidates who are disciplined and organized possess this trait. These individuals are honest and result-driven.
• Extraversion: Extraverted or extroverted candidates rely on external motivation, meaning they’re energetic and engage with their surroundings. In contrast, introverts prefer to work in solitude and are intrinsically motivated.
• Agreeableness: Candidates with this trait work excellently in teams. They’re compassionate and tend to be effective mediators in team settings.
• Neuroticism: Neuroticism is the likelihood of harboring and expressing negative emotions. Neurotic individuals tend to be unstable, passive-aggressive or hot-tempered compared to people with less neuroticism.

This self-administered test asks candidates to rate statements that describe them on a scale of one to five, with one being the least inaccurate to five being the most accurate. The results give insight into which traits reflect each candidate’s personality and to what degree.

The DISC Test

The DISC assessment evaluates candidates’ behaviors based on four factors. Candidates answer a self-evaluative assessment that uncovers where they align on the following dimensions:

• Dominance (D): This trait describes result-driven individuals who adapt to adverse situations and can take on challenges.
• Influence (I): People with high influence scores are effective in teams since they emphasize empowering and influencing people. They’re optimistic and social.
• Steadiness (S): These individuals are reliable and thrive in a moderately-paced work environment. They’re calm and sincere, which makes them dependable.
• Compliance (C): People with high compliance scores value accuracy, competency and quality of work. They’re detail-oriented and logical.

The assessment presents candidates with a series of statements and asks them to rate how much they agree or disagree. The DISC assessment results categorize candidates into single groups (D or S) or a combination of groups (SC or DC), depending on their scores.

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Process

By now, you know the benefits and importance of conducting behavioral tests, but how do they work?

While there are different ways to collect and process responses, each process follows a similar structure: defining what to measure and classifying responses meaningfully.

1. Define What to Measure

Each role has different requirements at varying degrees. These prerequisites include reliability, integrity, communication, leadership, and critical thinking.

Use an introspective lens to analyze team dynamics and culture to identify desirable habits, tendencies and attitudes needed to do the job well.

Realigning your focus from what candidates know to do to how they do it will help you uncover desirable behavioral competencies and use them as benchmarks later in the process.

2. Validate Criteria

Once you know the behavioral competencies you need to measure, your next step is to validate them. A good practice is to use internal performance data to set benchmarks. Specifically, focus on the behavioral makeup of high-performing individuals in your organization. These behavioral targets set the basis for developing grading criteria and evaluations.

3. Administer Candidate Assessments

Behavioral evaluations rely on well-researched frameworks to analyze behavioral patterns. So good riddance to the problems associated with guesswork, like bias and human errors. Instead, rely on scientific methods to calculate behavioral patterns compared to practical work-related scenarios.

Present your candidates with different scenarios and respective choices depending on the assessment type. Allow candidates to select the option that resonates with them the most.

The following are the most common question types:

• Multiple-choice Questions: Candidates can select one appropriate answer they relate to the most out of a set of predetermined options.
• Rating Scales: Let candidates select a number or item on a scale that denotes their level of sentiment to a particular statement.
• Dichotomous Questions: These close-ended questions have only two probable answers.
• Adjective Checklists: Candidates can select adjectives that best describe their sentiments or perceptions towards a statement or hypothetical scenario.

4. Analyze Findings

Once candidates answer the questions, the next step is categorizing the responses according to the preset frameworks. Bipolar scales, radar charts and other visual mapping techniques display personality traits, attitudes and behaviors and provide insights into varying degrees of certain tendencies.

Visually representing findings helps identify habits and predict behavior in a given setting. It’s also important to note that behavioral and personality categories and groups differ based on assessment types.

5. Determine the Next Steps

Last but not least, it’s time to understand what these behavioral patterns mean and how to leverage your findings. Use talent insights to develop suitable courses of action based on your candidates’ work, communication and leadership preferences.

Evaluating your candidates’ unique traits will help you align them to roles and responsibilities they’re capable of and position them with teams they’ll fit in like ducklings taking to the water.

These in-depth evaluations will assist your team leaders in creating a personalized approach for effectively communicating and managing each new and existing employee.

How Software Can Help

The good news is that there are behavioral assessment tools that automate the testing process from start to finish. Certain vendors provide behavioral testing modules that you can integrate with your existing hiring technologies, while other providers offer suite or all-in-one solutions.

Consider evaluating your pre-existing recruitment system for candidate testing capabilities. Some systems have built-in candidate assessments, start by contacting your software provider and ask about the full range of services.

If you’re in the early stages of starting your software search, consider referring to our recruiting software features and requirements checklist — curated by our analysts, to help you learn more about what a comprehensive recruiting system can do.

To kick things up a notch, consider adding talent assessment tools or talent intelligence tools to your hiring tech stack, enabling a seamless flow of candidate profiles from your applicant tracking system (ATS) into the testing platform. These tools rely on I/O psychologists to verify hiring and promotional criteria generated by the system to create accurate and bias-free assessments.

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The Wrap-up

Only some outstanding candidates will have impressive accolades on their resumes. So you need to be sharp in spotting top talent and growth potential. Behavioral assessments determine what makes candidates a good fit by evaluating their natural thought process, helping you focus on qualities instead of qualifications.

Which behavioral competencies are most important to your organization? Have you considered adding behavioral assessments to your talent selection strategy? Let us know in the comments!