For many years, job applicants had the edge in the marketplace. They could answer the interviewers’ questions in a way that they believed would win them the position. Resume embellishment is still common practice and so is a great interview performance. But hiring managers have good tools available to them – behavioral assessments. 

Some of these tools are a simple behavioral assessment. Others are comprehensive psychometric assessments. Regardless of the type of assessment you use, the resulting information will allow you to see your applicants in a new light.

5 reasons why you should require your applicants to take a behavioral assessment

Streamline Your Hiring Process

Over time, your organization will hire people to fill new positions and to replace employees who have left the organization. In some cases, your new hires will work out. In other cases, they may not, and you’ll have to help them exit the company. 

One way to increase your rate of successfully hiring new employees is to consider how well they will fit with the job and the company. If the behavioral assessment results indicate one candidate is clearly a better match than another, your hiring decision will be a bit easier.

Reduce Managers’ Preferences for Specific Candidates

Hiring managers can sometimes get stuck on wanting a candidate of a specific age or educational background. Often, these preferences come from a manager’s previous successful experience with a great team member. Unfortunately, relying on aspects like age and education won’t tell you much about how well an applicant might do in a specific position. But behavioral assessment test details will.

Reveal Applicants’ Motivations

Ideally, you want to hire an employee who considers working for you to be their dream job. The truth is most job seekers are using the “spray and pray” method. They send out hundreds of applications and hope that a few interviews will materialize from their efforts. 

Job seekers may be desperate to land any job just to stay afloat financially and have no real interest in working for your organization for the long term. Behavioral assessment results will reveal each individual’s motivational traits and may save you plenty of time and money.

Match Candidates’ Soft Skills to the Position Requirements

Soft skills, such as the ability to think critically, can be particularly important in a wide range of work settings. But other skills can be crucial to success in specific positions. For example, a high level of attention to detail is critical in a laboratory setting where an error could mean the difference between life and death for a patient.

Some individuals possess more persistence than others. Candidates who are naturally more persistent will likely continue working on a problem, such as a software bug. Managers can help employees improve this skill. But hiring a candidate with a naturally high tendency toward persistence, as indicated in behavioral assessments, will improve the team’s output.

Assist in Predicting On-​the-​Job Behavior

Hiring managers would like to have a crystal ball to help them understand one critical factor about the job applicants they’re interviewing. Specifically, they’d like to know about the individual’s on-​the-​job behavior. Onboarding a person with a tendency to exhibit toxic behavior such as trying to make their co-​workers look bad is best avoided. 

Careful study of assessment results will indicate if a candidate might turn to bullying others in certain work environments. In addition, behavioral assessment results will indicate whether an applicant is likely to be a high producer.

Summary

There’s plenty of buzz in the marketplace about whether the DISC behavioral assessment is better than the predictive index behavioral assessment. The truth is using a comprehensive psychometric assessment will generate best results. But the most important aspect of requiring job applicants to take a behavioral assessment is to use the information wisely when making a hiring decision.

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