by Dr. Charles Handler and Mark C. Healy, M.A.
Many ERE readers know that we at Rocket-Hire have a fanatical interest in the pre-employment assessment industry, and continuously comment about its trends and happenings. This interest in how end-users such as recruitment, HR, and line management actually use online assessment has led us to continue to run our Online Assessment Usage Survey, annually dating all the way back to 2002.
At the end of this article, you’ll find a link to this year’s survey. Please take a few minutes to help us and other members of our community learn more about assessment usage trends by providing us with information about your company’s screening and assessment practices (Don’t worry: all responses are confidential and we will only report aggregate data).
Given the steady increase in interest and the lack of information about this industry, we feel the results will continue to have value for the ERE community. We look forward to reporting our findings right here on ERE sometime this fall.
In order to provide some extra motivation, here’s a quick summary of the key findings from last year.
Summary of 2009 Findings
Last year’s findings were generally consistent with those of our past six years worth of data. Here is a quick summary. Last year, 148 end-users of assessment completed the survey, representing a very small increase over the previous year. Respondents represented a wide range of company sizes. The results confirmed what most of our previous surveys have found:
- Prescreening and assessment are continuing their gradual penetration into the mainstream of recruitment and hiring.
- Personality inventories and skill and technical certifications continue to be the most popular online assessment tools. Assessments of cognitive abilities as well as fit with the company culture have expanded as well.
- Respondents report a lack of understanding, weak budgets, or a general lack of support for online tools as their primary obstacles to adoption or greater use of modern prescreening and assessment technology.
- Those organizations that formally evaluate their hiring practices tend to support the use of prescreening and assessment, but a majority of assessment users are still failing to evaluate the effectiveness of their screening and assessment tools.
- Legal issues continue to affect the design and deployment of online hiring tools; however, a majority of pre-employment assessment users have not had any involvement in legal, EEO, or OFCCP proceedings.
There clearly is a growing interest in scientifically derived hiring tools. This trend is encouraging but not particularly surprising; these numbers will continue to grow as more organizations understand the value in properly evaluating the impact of screening and assessment tools, seeing for themselves how quality hiring tools can improve a workforce. We feel strongly that the current economic recovery is starting to drive a strong increase in assessment usage and we are eager to use this year’s survey to see if our hunch is correct.
This Year’s Survey
The goal of this year’s survey is to continue building on the information gathered from past surveys and to verify the fact that usage rates for online screening and assessment are increasing. There is tremendous value in the information your survey responses will provide. With your help, this year’s results will:
- Provide some reality to speculation regarding increases in the use of both online screening tools and online assessment tools.
- Provide a broader perspective on the evolution of the entire staffing process.
- Assist companies with some basic benchmark information about how online screening and assessment tools are being deployed.
- Likely confirm our speculation that while many companies are using online screening and assessment tools, few are collecting the metrics needed to help them understand the true ROI they are providing.
- Help us gain some insight into the assessment technologies that will be most popular in the near future.
All survey responses are confidential and individual responses will not be shared with anyone. We are not able to use information from individual vendors of screening and assessment tools or persons who may consult to multiple organizations.
Just click here and you’ll be taken to the survey, which should only take 10-15 minutes to complete. Please feel free to forward the link to any end-users of assessment. If you have any questions, contact chandler@rocket-hire.com. We look forward to sharing our results with you.