Why Use Assessments?

Reasons to Use Pre-Employment Assessments

• Two of three new hires will disappoint in the first year
• Two of three employees would rather work somewhere else
• Ninety-five of 100 applicants will "exaggerate" to get a job
• Most hiring decisions are made in haste - during the first five minutes of an interview
• One of three businesses will be sued this year over an employment issue
• Turnover costs thousands of dollars for every departing employee
• Eighty percent of employee turnover is avoidable

And...

Through Employee Synergy, clients know the employees they hire to be honest, reliable, drug-free and hard working.

You want employees who are dependable

According to a survey conducted in 2002 by CCH Inc., the cost of absenteeism has reached an all-time high, up to $789 per employee in 2002, from $755 in 2001. For small businesses, absences can cost up to $60,000 annually, and for large employers an unscheduled day in bed can cost $3.6 million per year. This was the direct cost reported by a survey of human resource professionals and does not include the cost of hiring others or paying overtime to perform the work of absent employees.

You can be held liable for employees' behavior on and off the job

You must know the nature of the people you hire because their criminal behavior could cost your business millions of dollars. Every time you hire without practicing due diligence, you may be accepting liability for their actions - even when they are "off the clock."

You can be sued for illegal discrimination

In the absence of objective data, how can you demonstrate a hiring/promotion decision was made objectively, without discrimination because of gender, race, religion, etc?

Resume writers write great fiction

In a survey of recent college graduates, 95% said they would be willing to make a false statement in their resumes in order to get a job. Forty-one percent admitted they had already done so, according to a report in Nation's Business (May, 1999).

Testing is acceptable, even expected

As reported in Molding Systems (May, 1999, v57 i5 p56 (1)), a survey found that 92% of job applicants accept testing as part of the job qualification process. Only 3% resent it, while 5% were neutral.

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Reasons to Use Post-Employment Assessments

Employee assessments also help organizations improve performance of current employees. Some of the powerful results you will realize using our employment assessments include:

• easily customize your sales training program to maximize the experience for each sales person and develop a powerful sales force
• accelerate achievement of team goals and build stronger, more effective teams
• alert top management to potential managerial problems that can develop when managers' goals are not in alignment with the goals of the organization
• develop effective managers
• improve customer service
• and ease frustrations and interpersonal conflict
• give managers the tools they need to maximize their strengths, become better managers, and lead more effectively

Pre and Post Assessments - Offer a Solution

Historically, employers depend upon resumes, references and interviews as sources of information for making hiring decisions. In practice, these sources have proved inadequate for consistently selecting good employees.

When training employees, a "one size fits all" approach has failed to provide the desired results.

When selecting people for promotion, otherwise excellent employees have too often been miscast into roles they could not perform satisfactorily.

Clearly, an essential ingredient for making "people decisions" has been missing from the formula.

The use of assessments has become essential to employers who

• want to put the right people into jobs;
• provide employees with effective training;
• help their managers to become more effective; and
• promote people into positions where they will succeed.

The use of assessments has resulted in extraordinary increases in productivity while reducing employee relations problems, employee turnover, stress, tension, conflict and overall human resources expenses.

Several factors contribute to the failure of traditional hiring methods. Resumes often contain false claims of education and experience while omitting information that would help employers make better hiring decisions.

Business references are of little value because most past-employers will tell you nothing but "name, rank and serial number."

These realities are the reason interviews have become the most influential factor in hiring and promotion decisions. However, experience shows only a coincidental correlation between the ability to deliver well in an interview and to deliver well on the job. Studies peg this correlation at 14% -- one good employee in every seven hires. Even background checks don't help much. The success rate becomes 26%, but that's only one good hire in every four. Unfortunately, many employers have accepted these poor results and the high cost of excessive turnover as a business reality. They have flown the white flag of surrender.

Don't Surrender! Assessments do help significantly

Assessing behavioral traits improved the hiring success rate to 38%.

When both thinking abilities and behavioral traits are assessed, the right people are hired 54% of the time.

When an assessment of occupational interests is added, successful results improve to 66%.

The most impressive results are achieved, however, when an integrated assessment is used - one that measures behavioral traits, thinking, occupational interests, plus "Job Match."

These integrated assessments employ cutting-edge technology and empirical data to assess the qualities of "The Total Person." In doing so, the individual qualities of candidates are compared to the qualities of employees who performing their duties in a superior manner. These 21st Century assessments successfully identify potentially excellent employees better than 75% of the time.

Job Match outranks all other factors

A well-documented study, published in Harvard Business Review concludes that "Job Match" is by far the most reliable predictor of effectiveness on the job. The study considered many factors including the age, sex, race, education and experience of approximately 300,000 subjects. It evaluated their job performance and found no significant statistical differences, except in the area of "Job Match." The conclusion: "It's not experience that counts or college degrees or other accepted factors; success hinges on a fit with the job."

The only reliable method for evaluating "Job Match" is with a properly designed assessment instrument, capable of measuring the essential job-related characteristics particular to each specific job. Profiles International has assessments designed for this purpose.

For more information about Employee Synergy assessments, please contact us

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How does Employee Synergy ensure my data security?

How is test data and information secured? How is the information protected from computer hackers?

Data is stored behind a firewall on a server separated from application servers. The database is further secured by a security layer implemented by the relational database software.

How Employee Synergy protects test data and information from breach of confidentiality?

User data is only displayed in sessions in which the user has established his or her identity via application level user name and password.

What level of encryption is used by Employee Synergy to transmit test data?

Pages that display or collect sensitive data are displayed using SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) technology. The level of encryption is dependent upon individual users' browser.

How Employee Synergy maintain data integrity?

Data is stored in a relational database on a server utilizing RAID (redundant array of independent disks) technologies to cover storage failures and nightly backups to cover system failures.

For more information about Employee Synergy assessments, please contact us

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