What It Takes to Find the Next Top Gun Employee
By Bill Schult Sr. Maximum Potential Inc.

In the film Top Gun, the most memorable part of the movie was the unforgettable behavior and skill of pilot Pete, “Maverick” Mitchell. Every Naval recruiter wanted to find the next “Maverick.”

For employers pursuing to find their next “Maverick”, their next successful hiring result, the question that should ultimately be asked: “Where is the validity?”. Validity always counts when looking at employee productivity and cost savings due to reduced turnover and other reasons.

According to Bill Schult Sr., President at Maximum Potential Inc., assessment vendors who can’t or won’t present hard data on validity are generally about marketing their assessments, not delivering results.

“Today assessment vendors attempt to say some interesting things but discussing the validity of their assessments often is not one of them,” Schult said.
In Maximum Potential’s 35 years of providing validated and predictive selection assessments to their clients, that comparison is reversed, validation and predictivity is the real task.

It seems like new vendors are showing up every day in the assessment arena. You could think of it like the early days of marketing where a peddler in his/her Conestoga Wagon would say that my product cured this or that, but just like the assessment business without any real validation, the peddler’s product didn’t cure anything.”

There are lots of trendy assessments in the marketplace, most citing catchwords like AI, big data, machine learning, and the like.

What they say sounds exciting. But, in the long run the real question is can they say their assessment results are valid? The medical business has the FDA to approve medical devices, medical processes and pharmaceuticals. There is not such an entity like the FDA in the assessment business. The closest is the EEOC, but they don’t validate assessments, so unlike the FDA-the assessment business has no approval process or no license is required.

It is important to note that validating assessments take time, research and money.

Anyone can say they’ve developed a personality assessment and start promoting it tomorrow. Regrettably , prospective clients who are not knowledgeable about the importance of validating personality assessments often are caught unsuspecting that there is a difference between validated and non-validated assessments.

Validity may be hard to talk about, so the easiest way to describe assessment validation it is to ask, “Does the assessment predict job performance? It’s that simple.
Also, to what extent does it predict performance? Does it predict performance accurately or not? Many novices are using gamified assessments that don’t really address the validation issue.

It’s not in their technical manuals, you can’t find it in their marketing materials, most times the reason for this is that the statistics to demonstrate their assessment predict actual performance doesn’t exist. And that’s the whole point of talent assessments is to predict performance.

They often tell prospective clients, our assessments are fun, quick to complete, AI based, and we’re fair to everyone.

The developer of the SaaS-based assessment platform that Maximum Potential offers to their clients has a large research team and they invest a lot in research. Many other assessment companies spend on marketing and tend to forget about doing the necessary research.

Many HR professionals don’t have technological expertise, so for them to assess the value of any specific assessment can be challenging. Any two assessments can look alike from a technical perspective, particularly when they are puffed-up with catchwords like Artificial Intelligence and big data.

The key factor to look for is an assessment vendor’s verification of validity and predicting job performance. Potential clients should ask for proof of predicting job performance, if they are not willing to provide proof you should just say, “No thanks.’ ”

Success in a given job should be verified by what psychologists call criterion-related validity studies. This just means identifying competencies that contribute to job success, then build a model that predicts performance over a period of time.

Our SaaS-based platform of assessments have more than eight hundred of these job models with the ability to identify candidates with greater potential in a given job

Competency-based assessments can resolve problems in areas of selection, development, training, promotion, and succession planning. These assessments help individuals, teams and organizations across many organizations. Also, psychologists can develop custom-built assessments for unique jobs for our clients.

“Personality assessments are designed, developed and validated to help organizations identify job candidates with the potential to be high performing employees.

An organization’s bottom line can be impacted hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars positively or negatively based on the selection and development of their employees resulting in the potential for increased profits or losses based on the long-term performance of their employees.

Organizations that make data-based decisions, within HR or other strategic areas, are having much success in the today’s market. Look at all the high value tech companies, they are all disciples in data-driven people strategies. These organizations count on the validity of their data to make their talent assessment decisions.

If you and your organization are not on the bandwagon of using validated and predictive assessments in your business perhaps it time to consider the reasons why you’ve not gotten on the bandwagon to making more informed hiring decisions and increasing the performance and success of your organization.

Please contact Bill Schult Sr. at billsr@maximumpotential.com/800.416.9575/651.452.8256