Of all the processes in an organization or company, none seem quite as dubious and prone to error as the hiring process. Building a synergetic team and identifying top talent is both an art and a science, but oftentimes hiring managers rely more on the art (gut feelings, instincts, personal preferences) than the science (data, assessments, case studies).
Enter the PXT Assessment.
This assessment helps organizations identify employees with the right skills, traits, and qualifications for the company’s available roles based on data and historical evidence. In a nutshell, it’s a tool that hiring managers can use to inject a little more science into the hiring process and rely less heavily on standards that are subject to personal biases.
Continue reading for a breakdown of how this assessment can help streamline hiring processes, reduce hiring manger’s workload, and build top-performing teams using data-driven methods.
Understanding the PXT Assessment
The PXT assessment is available for a variety of fields and industries. Its purpose is to supplement the hiring process to ensure that organizations are selecting the right candidates for open positions. It provides better assurance that the right decisions are being made for selecting candidates and team building.
It is also structured like other personality or behavioral assessments with questions designed to measure a candidate’s aptitude across a variety of qualifications (verbal reasoning, pace, assertiveness, independence…etc). Depending on the open position and how much each of these areas impacts performance in the given role, the assessment generates an overall fit score represented as a percentage and breaks down areas of strength or areas that would require development.
Understandably, how it identifies well-fitting candidates is adjusted based on the industry. Currently, the assessment is available for health care, finance, customer service, manufacturing, technology, and government. Each of these industries would require a different set of skills or dispositions for success, and so candidates are evaluated based on different measures.
Below are four impactful ways that incorporating a PXT assessment into the hiring process can benefit hiring managers, teams, candidates, and entire companies.
1. Streamlined Hiring Process
This assessment can help hiring managers and companies streamline hiring processes and identify candidates much more quickly than if they were relying solely on traditional recruitment and hiring practices.
By providing a PXT assessment early on in the candidate courting timeframe, companies can easily narrow down the pool of applicants to identify potential employees and reduce time spent on candidates that would be an ill-fit for the company’s culture and available position.
It also reduces doubt and guesswork when it comes to the hiring process. While some level of gut feelings and instincts will always be part of the hiring process, the assessment ensures that hiring managers do not feel that they are making blind decisions when selecting candidates to fill their open roles.
2. Making Informed Hiring Decisions
The PXT assessment is invaluable when it comes to making informed hiring decisions. Hiring managers can supplement their normal hiring processes by incorporating the data-driven aspects of the assessment.
Having a cut-and-dry score that represents a candidate’s fit for the open position takes the guesswork out of hiring. This assists hiring managers in identifying candidates with the appropriate skills and behavioral traits for a role so that they can fill in the blanks with the more intuitive or instinctual aspects of the hiring process.
The assessment dives into each candidate’s aptitude in multiple areas so that managers can understand their employees on a deeper level. Before hiring an employee, managers can prepare themselves with the assessment which identifies strong areas and areas for improvement. This will aid the managers’ effectiveness by identifying gaps in development or skill that would require coaching or focus on the manager’s part.
Further, the assessment reduces blind spots or possibilities that might not be considered in selecting candidates. For example, if a candidate is not the right fit for the open role, but displays a strong aptitude for another open role, the assessment would help identify this mismatch and the hiring team can direct the candidate to a more appropriate funnel thereby reducing the loss of strong candidates.
3. Enhancing Employee Retention
No doubt about it, high turnover rates or low employee retention is frustrating, demoralizing, and even costly to organizations. The PXT assessment can help reduce turnover and aid retention by ensuring an appropriate cultural fit between employees and the roles they fill.
The predictive nature of the data-driven assessment identifies candidates who have long-term potential and growth opportunities at the organization. It not only helps fill the available role but predicts the candidate’s aptitude beyond the open position into leadership or higher-responsibility roles in the given industry. Instead of candidates getting stuck or hitting a ceiling in their industry, the assessment would evaluate the long-term fit to retain top performers and help efficiently place them on the right career path.
4. Reducing Hiring Mistakes
Without data-driven metrics and analytics, the hiring process is subject to human error and mistakes. While the hiring manager’s intuition is important, relying solely on instinct leaves room for blind spots, biases, and hiring candidates that are not suitable fits which can be costly to the company and team morale.
When the PXT assessment is used as a data-driven supplement to the hiring manager’s own intuition, it can help reduce hiring mistakes and maintain team morale and stability. This assessment thoroughly evaluates candidates on the areas that are important to success in the given industry based on scientifically-backed research. This not only helps identify qualifications that might not have been considered previously, but it also helps affirm the hiring manager’s certainty in their hiring decisions to eliminate doubt or guesswork.
Incorporate the PXT Assessment into Your Hiring Process
Schedule a call with Dawn to begin evaluating candidates based on data-driven measures, reduce the hiring workload and time spent on finding candidates, and place and retain high-performing employees. The PXT assessment can be another effective tool to help streamline your hiring processes and build strong, qualified, and synergetic teams.
To learn more about the data reported on hiring after 2020, download the PXT Select white paper for FREE