September 10, 2013 Chicago, IL Author s Note: Given the disparate nature of the items discussed during this session, the notes are organized along the lines of Topical Areas rather than the chronological order of what was said in the meeting. Opening Comments The group was welcomed by Steve Miranda and Professor John Hausknecht of Cornell. After introductions, Steve turned the session over to Professor Hausknecht who helped to frame the upcoming discussions. Professor Hausknecht indicated that any decision to utilize assessments must consider five key factors: Who, When, Why, What and How. In more detail, take a look at the Assessments Factors table below: On September 10 th, 2013, Cornell University Associate Professor John Hausknecht and CAHRS Managing Director Steve Miranda facilitated a Working Group (WG) focused on how CAHRS Partner Companies are utilizing assessments in both the recruitment and development of employees. The WG was hosted by Boeing at their Chicago, IL location and was attended by 18 individuals from thirteen CAHRS partner and guest companies. These included Aetna, Boeing, Cargill, Caterpillar, Citi, Darden, General Electric, General Mills, IBM, Insight, Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble and the Cornell ILR School. Assessment Factors Who? When? Why? What? How? C-suite Director/VP Manager Analyst Hourly Recruitment Promotion Succession Candidate Development Skills Assessment Performance/Fit Retention Safety Expatriate Assignment Tests Interviews Simulations Assessment Centers Background Reviews Roles/Responsibilities of those Involved Role in Final Decision Communication Customized or Off-the-Shelf Medium/Format of Assessment
Page 2 Professor Hausknecht also shared the results of some recent research which showed that an individual s willingness to participate in an assessment was directly related to the cachet or status of a given organization as well as the way in which a candidate viewed him or herself. In a nutshell: If a company enjoyed a good external cachet/reputational status, candidates and employees typically did not object to taking an assessment, regardless of the specific nature of what was being assessed. If a company did not enjoy a good external reputation, then candidates and employees often did not react well to being asked to take an assessment. Candidates who had a high self-image of themselves tend to take assessments personally and as such, typically react more negatively when asked to take one. Given this, it s critical for an organization to understand how it is viewed externally before moving too quickly into a broader implementation of assessments as part of their standard HR talent management systems. Partner Recommendations After these initial discussions, the group spent some time compiling a list of CAHRS Partner recommendations for the development and implementation of assessments. Specifically: Determine right from the beginning whether the organization believes that individuals can truly change their behaviors based upon the results of these assessments or whether additional selling must be done to line management. Do not underestimate the number of times you may need to sell your program, especially to line managers in technical organizations. Make sure that assessments are linked to the core HR processes of performance management, succession planning and employee development. Put together a well-thought-through marketing plan to ensure that line managers understand what assessments can and can t do as well as buy into the regular use of assessments when making their key staffing decisions. Be very clear about who, specifically, is responsible for both acting upon as well as tracking an individual s progress against his/her assessment results. Take steps to ensure that rogue managers are not using assessment instruments haphazardly (and in some cases, illegally) when they may not be appropriately trained and/or educated in their use/abuse. Ensure that users understand the difference between evaluating cognitive skills and adaptability vs. knowledge, skills and expertise. Take specific steps to ensure that HR Business Partners aren t acting as intentional or unintentional blockers to a Center of Excellence (COE) team developing an overall assessment methodology and framework. If you choose to segment assessments by level (eg, skill assessments at lower levels, cognitive at mid levels, potential/adaptability at higher levels), make sure you decide up-front whether you plan to use these to identify and select like-minded individuals (eg, strong alignment to the company s way ) or as instruments for development. Saying one thing but doing another, especially in the area of personal assessments, will almost certainly lead to distrust. Understand whether your organization is looking for a simple assessment which is quick, dirty and cheap or a more sophisticated instrument that can be used for longer-term career planning purposes. Don t underestimate the difficulty of accommodating the complexity of the need against the desired simplicity of solution. That is, while a more complex assessment instrument may be more robust, it may be extremely difficult to scale. In certain parts of the world, you need to be aware that the content of an assessment (ie, the actual questions asked) may quickly be memorized and shared with individuals who have not yet taken the assessment thereby negating the value of the assessment. This is especially true as it regards assessments of specific technical knowledge.
Page 3 Operational Benchmarks A quick series of informal polls conducted with the attending CAHRS Partners showed the following: Approximately 20% use a 180 degree upward feedback instrument where supervisors are assessed by subordinates. This outcome is then used as an input into the supervisor s overall performance rating. The remaining 80% did not. Approximately 50% assess knowledge, skills and experience, with most of these being in large-scale manufacturing organizations. Almost all assess cognitive skills and potential. Almost all believe that one of the best decisions an organization can make is to implement assessments much earlier in the employee career development cycle. Breakout Discussions The group then broke into four specific subgroups focused on a specific issue or set of issues. The key discussion points from each group are summarized below. Group One: Implementation Challenges Make sure you articulate the value of assessments in business terms, not HR-speak (ie, talk about improving sales-force productivity, not self-actualizing human potential ). When first implementing a program, consider using pilots with friendly users in order to increase the odds of getting wider organizational buy-in later. Do not underestimate the value of a strong relationship between HR Business Partners and the COE developing the given assessment process. Similarly, do not underestimate the potential difficulties created if such a relationship is not established. Having a standard toolkit from which to select various assessment instruments is very helpful in ensuring that established protocols are followed and consistent outcomes delivered. The best tools are the ones that don t take a long time to complete and which are regularly affordable by either the HR function or the line organization. One of the Partners indicated that if anyone in the company participates in a 360 degree process, someone from HR must be involved in order to ensure the integrity of the process as well as the appropriate and accurate interpretation of the data. Do not underestimate the amount of time it may take to get your organization to buy into the value of assessments. Do not roll out organization-wide assessment initiatives until you can verify that there is organizational readiness. If you use an outside provider for a given assessment instrument, make sure you require that provider to both understand your organization s culture as well as use your organization s vocabulary. Be very clear around the accountability of three specific individuals: the employee taking the assessment, his/ her line manager, and the HR individual involved. Be very clear with vendors that their instruments and processes cannot consume large amounts of the organization s time. While they may push for the valid and thorough assessments, you will get more organizational commitment if you are able to get 80% of the way there with lower levels of time required. Group Two: Marketing/Education/Communication Challenges Don t underestimate the level of fear that may exist in an organization when people find out about a given assessment process. It s critical to have lots of upfront transparency and a well developed communication plan in order to let people know exactly how the assessments will (and won t) be used.
Page 4 While sharing the rationale for why the assessments are being done is important, it s equally important for people to understand how the process will work, who will have access to their data, whether they will be able to see their own results, etc In short, providing details on the how is just as critical as on the why. It s also critical to make the explanations as simple and straightforward as possible. Do not use HR-speak or company jargon but everyday common language to communicate with the employees. Provide context: Most of the organizations indicated that they positioned assessments as part of an overall portfolio of development tools aimed at improving both the individual employee as well as overall organization. Group Three: Selecting Assessment Instruments The most important first-step is to determine which specific type of assessment (eg, Cognitive? Potential? Behavior? Competency? Skill?) will be the most beneficial to your overall corporate or business unit strategy. When doing so, the critical question to ask is, Once I have this data, what will both the organization and the individual be able to do with it? Take the time to develop relationships with both universities and consulting firms to determine whether there may be some novel ways to perform an assessment. One partner company shared that one of its most difficult positions to staff is welders. To help address this issue, the company has partnered with a university that offers courses in welding as part of a two-year degree program, working with the instructors to design an assessment process that now evaluates how good a welder is before a job offer is extended. When choosing specific assessment instruments, be aware that certain industries or professions may be more or less willing to accept assessments as a key input into staffing decisions than others. One example cited was the legal profession that the partners viewed as generally having a negative view of assessments. The selection of your instrument must also be driven by the number of people you need to assess. Online automated assessments are better for high volumes while more customized processes such as in-person interviews by a trained IO Psychologist may be the best for very small volumes. Group Four: Process Integration and Technology Challenges Assessments must be integrated into the overall set of standard HR processes (eg, performance management, succession planning, etc ) One Partner shared that the three key questions that the teams responsible for assessments in their organization must deal with are: 1. Criticality: Why should business leaders pay attention to these results? What are the opportunities or consequences of not acting on what we are seeing? 2. Capability: Given what you see in these results, do you feel better or worse about whether your team can deliver upon its short and long-term goals? 3. Credibility: Do we have standing within both the organization and individual? That is, can we show that what we are doing both provides value to the individual as well as some predictive insight to the organization? Assessments provide the most insight when integrated with data from other parts of HR (eg, performance evaluations, 360 degree feedback, employee engagement scores, etc ). However, almost all of the partner companies participating indicated that the ability to smoothly and easily integrate data from various systems was a problem that none of them had been able to solve. Top performance. One partner shared that its organization recently made the decision to set aside 20% of the base salary increase pool for payment to high potential employees. The lack of an ability to integrate data was a major area of concern for the group, with several participants indicating that this often prevented both the HR team and line management from drawing key strategic insight from the multiple disjointed data sets. Many companies have already made modifications to their overall executive compensation plans based upon the current economic and political climate.
Page 5 One partner shared that its company had attempted to deal with this issue by assigning a specific group within HR to collect any and all data related to assessments. The assessment data was then aggregated and an organizational dashboard was created showing where the company is strong or weak on a given assessment attribute. The group agreed that there seems to be a growing overlap between the work being done by the HR Analytics folks and the Assessment folks. One company has recently combined these two areas and created a join Talent Analytics and Assessments group. Candidate Reaction to Assessments The Working Group also spent some time discussing how various candidates react to the use of assessments in the recruitment process. In summary: It s a myth that candidates, as a whole, will balk at assessments as part of an online pre-screening process. One Partner indicated that for its online submissions, 95% of applicants complete the relevant assessment with only a 5% abandon rate. Because of the relative increase in recruiting over the past 12 months, all of the Partners indicated that they were looking at instruments that a candidate could complete in 60 minutes or less. It is challenging to balance the conflict between wanting to make your recruiting website engaging for job seekers while simultaneously providing useful data for the actual candidate selection. Leveraging Social Media to get word of mouth to the street about your recruiting process is a double-edged sword. While it can potentially drive people to apply, it can also be used to share the very question you re using as part of the assessment. As such, finding ways to rotate the questions in order to protect your assessment intellectual property becomes critical in order to prevent applicants from gaming the system. Some companies share the results of application assessments back with candidates but through the lens of development rather than selection (ie, tell them aggregated strengths and areas for improvement rather then why they didn t get the specific job). Possible Topics for Future Working Groups 1. The overlap between human capital analytics and assessments. 2. How assessment implementation varies around the world. 3. A roundtable discussion of specific assessment instruments used, vendors and technology platforms: Who s using which for what purposes? 4. Drawing the connection between assessments and organizational performance. What are HR functions doing to try and connect the dots for business leaders?
Page 6 This Summary Report was prepared by Steve Miranda and John Hausknecht for use by participants of the CAHRS Employee Assessments Working Group and CAHRS Partner organizations. The Center for Advanced Human Resource Studies (CAHRS) is an international center serving corporate human resources leaders and their companies by providing critical tools for building and leading high performing HR organizations. CAHRS mission is to bring together partners and the ILR School s world-renowned HR Studies faculty to investigate, translate and apply the latest HR research into practice excellence.