Making the Business Case for Assessments - Concern #5

The following is Concern #5 of an excerpt of Making the Business Case for Assessments by Ron Tepner and Dan Lezotte in Human Resource Executive Online.
Concern: Does the assessment really work? I'm pretty good at reading people and generally know who I should and should not hire.


Response: .....our hiring success prior to using assessments was less than stellar, although the success rate varied across our 2,300 stores. Too many new hires in the technician/mechanic position left within the first six months on the job, so we were always looking to bring in new technicians.


We needed to show our field managers that more patience and care in the selection of technicians would pay off for them in the long run through lower turnover and greater productivity, leading to fewer open positions. To do this, we needed to demonstrate the value of assessments in a language they understood -- that is, the way assessments could help them grow their business.


We believed that a clear demonstration of the value of assessments to business outcomes would allay most, if not all, of their concerns.

To demonstrate the value of our assessments for the technician position, we conducted, with the help of our vendor-partner APT, a comprehensive validation study. For test developers, our approach would be referred to as a "predictive, criterion-related validation study."

This study also provided our legal defensibility in the event our selection processes are challenged under Title VII....And, since we knew actual out-of-pocket costs associated with bringing a new hire on board (about $2,300 per hire), we were able to convert the differential turnover rates into a dollar amount. We conservatively estimated we could save $1.5 million in turnover costs by using the assessment and avoiding hiring those applicants in the bottom quartile.

Ron Tepner, the vice president of human resources for Bridgestone Retail Operations, headquartered in Bloomingdale, Ill. Daniel Lezotte is Darien, Conn.-based APT's vice president for the Midwest Region.