On this month’s The Welsh Wire podcast, Sheri Welsh sits down with HR consultant Kerry Garman to discuss the value of pre-employment assessment tools and why interviews alone often fall short when evaluating candidates.
“What I found when I was hiring people, especially right out of college, is they were extremely practiced in interviewing,” he says. “They were trained how to interview. Schools were conducting classes on interviews. I would come in, and I would get this person interviewing with me, answering all the questions the right way. So I began a process of trying to get around that.”
Garman then explained how assessments became a strong way of differentiating candidates and helped reduce bias in the hiring process.
He is a strong proponent of ProfileXT (PXT), a pre-employment and development assessment tool that helps organizations align candidates and employees to specific roles.
PXT measures cognitive abilities, behavioral traits, and interests to create a benchmark “success pattern” for a position, then compares individual profiles to predict job fit, reduce turnover, and improve performance.
The cost of using a pre-employment assessment, Garman notes, is minimal compared to the cost of making a bad hire.
“A lot of times, the assessment becomes pride in not who you’ve hired, but in who you’ve avoided hiring. You avoid putting those people on the payroll. That’s where the money costs, because it costs 70% of a year’s salary when you hire the wrong person, and that’s training and everything that goes with it.”
Regardless of which assessment tool an organization uses, Garman advises employers to do their homework.
“Ask questions. Don’t accept marketing. Take the assessment seriously enough to investigate it,” he says. “Look at how it’s structured and make sure it’s scientifically based, defensible, and legally acceptable.”
Listen today about pre-hire assessments and how they can strengthen your hiring process in this episode of The Welsh Wire with Kerry Garman and host Sheri Welsh.
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