Why Conduct Assessment for Senior Level Employees?
So many justifications have been made in the past for why there is no need for organisations to conduct assessment for their senior level roles. Their already established expertise, superior knowledge etc are some of the reasons that have been put forward as to why assessment is redundant and a waste of time for senior level hiring.
If you are in this category, then maybe the following statistics will change your mind.
- Forty percent of senior executives leave organisations or are fired/pushed out within 18 months because of culture mismatch.
- Assessment has the ability to reduce turnover by 30%
- Organisations lose 5x annual salary to wrongly hired executives.
Another eye-opening statistic shows that 76% of organisations with more than 100 employees rely on assessment tools such as aptitude and personality tests for external hiring. That figure is expected to climb to 88%. This indicates that many organisations are already seeing the importance of assessment. This is because they now fully understand the implications of not doing so.
The cost of hiring the wrong professionals for your senior-level roles is high when they are not assessed in the right way.
Recommended Post: 5 Reasons You Should Incorporate Assessment Centre Into Your Hiring Process
Potential Cost of Hiring Senior-Level Professionals Without Assessment
It can lead to having wrong senior-level hires. That’s not where it ends though. The hiring mistake has a ripple effect which includes;
- Dampening the morale of everyone in the organisation: No matter how seamless the recruitment process may be, it would still have required the energy and stress of the organisation to get the candidate. Therefore, if they turn out to be the wrong candidate, this would dampen their morale.
- It gives the organisation a bad reputation: Hiring wrongly can lead to questioning of the organisation about their ability to get their recruitment right, especially since it is a senior role. It also calls to question about how they ended up hiring the candidate in the first place, and whether due process was followed.
- It can lead to corporate crisis e.g., Former American energy company Enron hired a new CEO, and then later, a CFO, to take its organisation to greater heights. The reverse happened instead. They introduced some new accounting practices which allowed the organisation to commit massive financial malpractices for years, eventually bringing the giant organisation to its knees.
- Productive hours spent on hiring the wrong candidate could have been allocated elsewhere, leading to wasted time and effort. Other projects which were put on hold in order to hire the candidates is also a cost.
- Terminating the contract of these professionals could also lead to paying legal fees, especially because they are senior roles.
With the above, it is clear that you cannot afford to hire without assessment for your senior-level management positions. Besides, the benefits of using assessment are too important to ignore.
8 Benefits of Conducting Assessment for Senior Roles
A. Establish culture fit: Assessing for culture fit is one of the most important decisions you can make before hiring any executive for your senior roles. This is because of the numerous benefits it has, such as; checking if the values, goals, actions and beliefs of the candidates align with yours.
Conducting this assessment before hiring candidates has helped to reduce the rate of turnover, increased satisfaction on the job, which usually translates to increased rate of work performance, as well as increased commitment to the goals of the company.
It is important to note that assessing for job skills is as important as assessing for culture fit, hence it must not be overlooked in your senior level recruitment.
B. Take note of behavioural tendencies: Assessment helps you easily identify the behavioural tendencies in candidates for your senior roles. By doing this, you are able to assess their actions and determine how they will behave when they start working in your organisation.
Behavioural assessments, interviews and self-observation are often deployed to test for this skill.
C. Have prior knowledge of personality traits: Assessment helps you identify the inherent thoughts, feelings and behaviour of individuals. You can also easily assess their motivations, approaches, attitudes to work.
This is because personality traits have been discovered as a major determinant of how people behave in the workplace. Organisations often use personality assessment to identify these traits.
D. Identify strength and developmental areas: You can easily identify the areas where your executive-level hires are at their strongest and help them build on them. Through assessment, you can also easily identify their weaknesses and help create a development plan which will assist them in covering the gaps.
E. Assessment adds objectivity to the hiring process: Hiring with objectivity is non-negotiable in your hiring process, and the surest way you can achieve that is to ensure you deploy assessment when filling your C-level positions. Skills assessment such as the different psychometric assessments and competency-based interviews can help you assess their skills level.
Other assessments such as behavioural tests and personality tests can help you understand their actions and attitude, tests like situational judgement tests can assess their decision-making abilities, while leadership test can assess their ability to effectively manage and lead their colleagues to achieve set goals.
At the end of the day, only candidates who successfully pass through these assessment processes are considered for recruitment.
F. You can gain insights into how well they will likely perform on the job: When conducted right, Assessment has the ability to help you gain insights into how well the candidate will perform in the role.
This is because assessment already reveals their skills level, attitude, critical thinking ability, teamwork, etc and other competencies required in the role.
G. Gives a more accurate measure of who the top-performing candidate is before giving them the job: Assessment has the advantage of delivering measurable results. You can easily rank the candidates based on how they performed during the assessment period, and this will ensure the best senior professional is hired.
H. Helps you assess for core values in your new hires: Through assessment, you can identify the values and beliefs of the new hire to see if they align with yours.
Conclusion
Senior-level positions are just as important as the name sounds. Therefore, you should ensure that you avoid the trap of thinking interviews alone can get you the right senior executive. Deploying assessments to test the required competencies to succeed in the role cannot be overlooked.
At Workforce Group, our range of assessment exercises for senior-level hires have been deployed over the years for clients to ensure they have the right people in their senior roles.
Schedule a consultation with us today to discuss how we can help you win and achieve all your set business goals.
