What are talent assessments?

By Elsbeth McSorley

You say tomato, I say talent assessments. Seems like such a generic term – talent assessments. What are talent assessments anyway?

Talent assessments are effective tools for managing people – hiring the right person for the right job, evaluating candidates for a promotion, managing and developing your team members, and ultimately understanding the people who make up your workforce. Behavior, personality, cognitive, skills, integrity, job knowledge, and a variety of other assessments are used to uncover different aspects of a person’s makeup. Three of the most common types of talent assessments include:

• Behavioral assessments – provide an accurate depiction, or pattern, of people’s core drives, and therefore insight into their needs and behaviors.
• Cognitive assessments – measure someone’s ability to solve problems, think on their feet, reason and other mental capabilities required to excel in specific jobs.
• Integrity assessments – test a person’s honesty, dependability, trustworthiness, reliability and prosocial behavior.

While each kind of assessment has useful applications depending on your objective, behavioral assessments are particularly revealing, powerful, and relevant to solving some of your most strategic and consequential people-related issues. Having a solid grasp — built on actual data, not observation — of how each employee can be expected to behave in a given role or work situation, and how to interface with and motivate them will allow you to anticipate, manage, and resolve people-related issues long before problems occur.

Cognitive assessments gauge learning aptitude through the analysis of answers to verbal, math, and spatial reasoning questions and measure an individual’s capacity to learn, adapt, and grasp new concepts in the workplace. When paired with a behavioral assessment, a cognitive assessment significantly increases your ability to predict on-the-job performance. Cognitive ability assessments are among the best predictors of training success and job performance across all job levels and industries. Several studies show that when you assess a candidate’s behavioral make-up and cognitive ability, you are many times more likely to be able to predict if they will meet or exceed job performance expectations.

Data-driven talent assessments can help you evaluate candidates, organize teams and develop employees, and give you unprecedented confidence and accuracy in the selection and development of the individuals you depend on to make your company successful. Learn more about The Predictive Index’s solutions and how you can harness talent assessments to supercharge your workforce!