Can employee assessments take my business from good to great?

01/04/14

Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, states one of the keys to improving your company’s performance in the marketplace is “getting the right people on the bus”.  Assessments help you to do just that.  But the best-in-class companies are doing more than that.  They are using assessments to both find and develop the talent they need to make the leap from good to great.

 

A recent survey of by the Aberdeen Research group suggested that those companies who have been able to achieve high levels of management satisfaction with new hires, superior performance from their employees, and the skills and abilities they need for both current and future growth tend to:

• Utilize assessments as one source of objective data when making hiring decisions.
• Have a specific and well-defined assessment process uniformly applied across applicants for specific positions.
• Foster collaboration between HR, business management, and assessment provider to ensure that assessment content addresses business needs.
• Have senior executive leadership that supports and believes in the value of assessments.
• Provide training focused on the effective use of results for hiring managers.
• Use pre-hire assessment data to create individualized development plans for onboarding and future training.

 

To go from good to great, your organization should partner with an employee and pre-hire assessment firm that takes the time to understand your organization and its business needs, matches the assessment to those needs, and helps the organization to find ways to integrate the assessment data with the organizations employee development and succession planning efforts.  According to Aberdeen, the organizations that were successful in doing this “achieved double-digit gains over their counterparts in their ability to achieve organizational goals and execute business strategy, hire individuals who get up to speed quickly, and improve the overall engagement of their entire employee base.”  When you have done this, you will know you have “the right people on the bus” and your results will show it.