Our next installment of Frequently Asked Questions is written by Bas van de Haterd, Founder and MD of Digitaal-Werven.
We asked Bas what he thinks are the most important developments in assessment technology. Read on for his response…
The most important development in assessment technology is the main reason I got so fascinated by it in the first place. Many decades of scientific research have been put into applications in recent years that can assess candidates at scale in a cost-effective way while improving both reliability as well as the candidate experience.
We can now, at scale, test all applicants in a reliable manner on cognitive and psychometric traits. Of course, this doesn’t reach the reliability of a full-day assessment with role-playing games observed by a trained psychologist, but those assessments don’t scale so you cannot apply them to all applicants. Modern assessment technology can be applied in the pre-selection, even before anybody looks at a resume.
One of the best things about digital assessment technology is that by applying it at scale you can increase the quality of hire. Attrition, where it is high, can be lowered significantly. Sales by salespeople will go up and so on. The amazing bonus you get is that by doing this, diversity increases.
Everywhere pre-screening assessments are properly implemented diversity increases on all metrics. Turns out talent for any job doesn’t stick to lines of gender or age, but recruiters selecting based on resumes unconsciously seem to think they do.
One important development of late is the increasing knowledge of cognitive traits needed to excel at certain tasks. Take air traffic controller, for example, a specific job where game-based assessment technology can predict if someone is able to successfully finish the training program. For this job, there is little to no correlation with any degree, giving opportunities to those who had less. The more jobs we learn what cognitive traits a person needs, the more we can start hiring on future-fit and the ability to learn specific skills.
The video below is Transavia showing how they recruited better by testing.
In linguistic assessment technology, we see rapid improvements as well. This technology is able to identify psychometric traits based on the language you use. Your personality is directly linked to the choice of words and the sentences you make it turns out. Although the technology doesn’t have the reliability of game-based assessments yet, the candidate experience is so much better as you can just scan articles or the text from an interview and the candidate doesn’t have to do a lot of extra tasks.
Below is a video of a Dutch soccer team, AZ talking about the cognitive testing of youth players.
And the last, but really promising, development that’s not yet commercially available, is the use of actual game data. The Dutch military is currently funding very promising experiments to see if based on game data from games like Minecraft, League of Legends, and other games people play for fun can be used to predict job success in specific jobs.
The first results are really promising. So in the future, we might be able to help adolescents and young adults with career advice when they share their gaming profiles with an algorithm. The games you play combined with the types of success you have in those games seem to be able to predict future job success.
About the Author:
Bas van de Haterd helps organizations select smarter by using technology. He helps organizations select the best tooling to fit both the skills needed for the job as well as the employer brand of the organization and implement it in a way that delivers the best value for the organization while making sure the tool stays bias-free.
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