In today’s ultra-competitive market, your company can have the most robust tech stack, the best product lineup, and the greatest marketing on the planet — and still fall behind. Why? None of this matters if you haven’t hired the right people.
This is an all-too-common issue. Too often, candidate sourcing, recruiting, interviewing, and onboarding aren’t treated as some of the biggest challenges in hiring. On the contrary, they’re routinely seen as one of the simplest aspects of the human resources cycle. Yet extending an employment offer to a poor-quality applicant — or even an applicant who simply isn’t the right fit — can have a serious ripple effect throughout your entire organization.
When researchers at Northwestern University studied the impacts of bad hires, their investigations unearthed some important statistics. They discovered that around three-quarters of employers admitted to making at least one hiring error. They also found that most experts put the raw cost of a wrong hire at 30% of the person’s annual pay. And if the individual is in a leadership position, the stakes get much higher. According to a Harvard Business Review piece, managers with negative traits ended up “teaching” those traits to teammates, laying the groundwork for future employee morale and engagement problems.
The way to sidestep these concerns is to ask candidates to undergo objective pre-employment assessments. But you can’t just throw these tests together. Your assessments must be valid.
How Test Validity Works in Pre-Employment Assessments
What does it mean for a test to be valid? Test validity involves making sure that a test actually measures what it says it measures. In other words, the test is fair and reliable. Unfortunately, many pre-employment assessments that appear to be objective aren’t. This can put your company at risk of not just hiring the wrong person but of violating EEOC hiring guidelines, too.
How do you confidently move forward with test development and validation in light of that? You leverage at least one proven employee selection procedural approach: content validity, criterion validity, or — used more rarely — construct validity.
Content validity ensures that the content of any test represents the “content” of the role. For example, you may ask applicants to undergo an assessment with robust content. However, if the content doesn’t line up with what the applicant would do as your employee, the content isn’t valid.
Measuring content validity starts with a thorough job analysis that goes well beyond the vagueness of most job descriptions. During the job analysis process, researchers pinpoint the critical tasks, knowledge, and skills necessary to be successful in a specific role. The results can then be used to construct a valid assessment instrument.
Where does criterion validity fit in? Criterion validity provides evidence that a test with validated content works in real life based on statistical analysis. Therefore, you might administer your newly created pre-employment assessment to current employees as well as new hires. With the assessment results in hand, you could collect job performance data. The data would indicate whether you ended up with a statistically significant correlation between test performance and job performance. Ideally, you would want to end up with an assessment that was valid for both content and criterion.
As mentioned above, construct validity isn’t relied upon as frequently during hiring. Nonetheless, it’s worth mentioning as a third method to validate tests. Construct validation relies upon sizable data sets to evaluate a test on a big-picture “construct” like dependability or ethical behavior. As you can imagine, constructs take time to measure and validate. Consequently, you’ll probably focus more heavily on content and criterion validity when first updating your pre-employment assessments.
Eliminating Gaps in the Candidate Selection Process
Ultimately, you want to do the right thing when it comes to hiring employees. Making sure the tests you provide to interested candidates are valid can help you meet that goal. Remember: Getting the right people from day one can strengthen your organization and mitigate future issues.
At Biddle Consulting Group, we have the expertise to be your test validity partner. Contact us today to start a conversation about how you can apply science thoughtfully in the design, validation, and administration of your pre-employment assessments.
