Assessment's role in future-proofing your business

When the Wright Brothers made the first powered flight in December 1903, few can have imagined they were witnessing the birth of a new industrial era. The flight lasted only 12 seconds and never got more than 10 feet off the ground. And yet, less than 15 years later, the British Government was able to form the Royal Air Force, with 20,000 advanced aircraft and 300,000 staff.

The technological landscape of the future is, arguably, even harder to predict today than it would have been for those present at that first inauspicious flight. While rapid technological development itself is nothing new, the transformation we are currently going through is of unprecedented scope, with virtually no sector untouched by digitisation and almost all companies having to adjust their strategies in order to survive the “Fourth Industrial Age”. Even law firms have begun using artificial intelligence to interrogate dense legal databases and find solutions to cases faster than a human mind could do.

Experts predict that the scale of these changes will have major implications for how all of us live and work in the future. According to the World Economic Forum, 30% of jobs will disappear by 2025 while the US Department of Labor predicts that 65% of today’s schoolchildren will ultimately be employed in jobs that have yet to be invented.

Evidently, these changes will also have an impact on the strategies organisations adopt for recruiting talent. The fact that business requirements are evolving at an ever-increasing pace means that HR teams will have to ask themselves urgent questions about who they hire and how. What role will people play in our organisation in the future? What skillsets are we currently missing? How can we upskill our existing teams? Who do we need to bring in from outside the organisation in order to future-proof our business?

In the course of addressing these critical questions, HR professionals may well need to rethink their selection and assessment practices to ensure they are identifying the candidates and employees who will be of most benefit to the organisation in the future. We have identified three key steps businesses can take to enhance their assessments and help future-proof some of their most important talent decisions.

Focus on the future

The first and most obvious step organisations must take is towards a more future-focused view of jobs and skills. Graduate recruiters, for example, have traditionally focused on candidates’ “potential for leadership”. In today’s business environment, where the ability to keep flexing and thriving is critical, organisations need, instead, to find candidates with “potential for anything”. In other words, assessments should focus, above all else, on the capacity of individuals to think and work in an agile way, along with attributes such as adaptability, sound judgement and purposefulness.

Create a fully digital process

The application of digital technology in today’s selection processes is something of a mixed bag. Most organisation have now automated their screening process, improving efficiency and speeding up time-to-hire. Many have also enhanced their early selection stages with video interviewing, realistic and immersive assessments and even games. But when it comes to the final, face-to-face assessment, technological innovation tends to be thin on the ground, with many organisations clinging to their old paper-based solutions (and the age-old issues that inevitably go with them, such as data management, monitoring and evaluation, and interviewer bias).

This ‘digital disconnect’ undermines the process both from the organisation’s perspective and from that of the candidate as well. It is time for organisations to digitalise the entire assessment domain. Moreover, they must do so not simply by transferring existing tools to an online environment but rather by creating a human-centred digital platform – a platform that delivers comprehensive insights and engages people in ways that pre-digital assessment could not.

Demand tangible results

The days of stab-in-the-dark assessments are long behind us. In a world of super-abundant data and insight, we must demand that assessment solutions deliver real business results in terms of effectiveness, experience and efficiency. At Sova Assessment, we are leading the way in delivering tangible outcomes for our assessment clients. Notable achievements of recent years include:

• Enabling RSA and Santander to identify high performers with 80-90% accuracy
  
  
• Helping John Lewis achieve 50/50 gender balance among new recruits
  
  
• Speeding up the completion time for Santander assessments from 11 to 1.5 days
  
  
• Reducing Zurich’s dependence and associated spend on face-to-face assessment by 40%

Rather than compromise, it is now possible with digital assessment to deliver accurate focus on capabilities for the future, fairness, efficiency and a great experience at the same time.

Build a workforce for the future

Predicting the unpredictable may feel like an exercise in fortune-telling, but it doesn’t need to be. By combining scientific rigour with digital technology, and by following the three steps outlined above, you can secure a new generation of employees with the agility and adaptability to lead your organisation into the future, whatever that future may bring.

To find out more please visit www.sovaassessment.com or get in touch directly at [email protected]