Pre-Employment Assessments: A Good Idea?

If you're a hiring manager that utilizes pre-employment assessments, check out Jonathan P. Niednagel and his website/blog, BrainTypes.com. The guy drives me nuts for no other reason than the fact that he updates so infrequently and I really like what he has to say. His area of expertise is in professional athletics and he's made a name for himself working as a personnel consultant to several high-profile sports teams across the NFL, NBA and MLB. Because athletes in team sports typically receive guaranteed, multi-year contracts, teams are under tremendous pressure to thoroughly screen and evaluate the players before making long-term financial commitments.

Niednagel gained national attention in 1998 with his pre-draft assessments of Peyton Manning and Ryan Leaf, the #1 and 2 picks respectively, in the NFL draft that year. He stated that based on his analysis of their individual brain types, Manning would become a superstar in the NFL while Leaf would struggle. Manning is the reining Super Bowl MVP; Leaf has been out of the league since 2002 and is now an assistant college coach.

Neidnagel's "brain typing" theory is a derivative of the old Myers-Briggs personality tests that classifies individuals based on a combination of preferences such as feeling, thinking, sensing, perceiving, etc. (A good site for discovering your own brain type is Socionics -- I test out as an ESTP: extroverted, sensing, thinking and perceiving).

What I find interesting about his work is that he claims these preferences manifest themselves through motor skills such as eye contact, voice inflection, body movements (the way you walk, hand gestures), etc., so you can determine a person's brain-type or innate "wiring" without them having to take a self-assessment test. He believes, as do I, that self-assessments produce inaccurate results, particularly when it comes to pre-employment testing, due to a number of reasons:

* Multiple perceptions: most people feel they act differently in different settings. "At home I'm fun loving and gregarious, but at work I'm strictly business." I've had people ask me before taking a personality assessment, "Am I supposed to answer this how I think I am or how I think other's perceive me?" The result is usually a combination of those two perspectives.

* Skewed perception of self: too often we see ourselves differently than the rest of world sees us. Remember the first time you heard a recording of your own voice?

* Manipulated results: Candidates recognize how much is riding on these results and make adjustments to their answers based on what they think the company wants to see. I've had clients that will not speak with a candidate unless the results from their pre-assessment comes back favorably--regardless of what their resume says.

Neidnagel claims that even when you take a self-assessment with no vested interest in the outcome, the results are only 75% accurate. Basing a hiring decision on these results is like heading off on a cross-country trip with only 75% of the directions being correct. If you (or your company) insist on using pre-assessments as part of your candidate screening process, I recommend their weight be no more than 10% of the overall hiring criteria.

Comments

[jeff paul portal]

Thanks for bringing this to my attention - I’ve reviewed it myself now. A very enjoyable read