Posted by:
Erick
(
)
Date: April 12, 2013 12:27PM
There are couple of things that need to be taken into consideration here. First, the Myers Briggs assessments were among the first in the market, and so they have market share simply for that reason alone. They are by no means the most accurate, ie, reliable and valid, instruments on the market. There are a number of products which are scientifically valid. There is Hogan, Prevue, Predictive Index, Profiles international, etc. Those are some of the bigger names in the field. There are also specialty organizations like The American Research Institute in D.C. that develop custom pre-hire assessments for specific industries.
The prevailing orientation of these instruments is to match candidates with jobs along categories Risk analysis (honesty/integrity assessments), job-fit, and job/culture-fit. There are skills assessments which are straightforward tests on job-related activities. I have used many of these to surprising results. Other common categories are to study candidates along thinking styles, motivational styles, occupational interests, and behavioral styles. The MBT1 by contrast, is more of labeling device not too dissimilar from the four-quadrant theories of personality, in order to give an employer/hiring manager "information" to make a better hire. What is generally missing from the MBT1 is any kind of rigorous analysis of job requirements. In other words, we can get some insight into a candidate, but we really don't know how to qualify the candidate on the basis of that information. In other words, what personality types do we actually need, as opposed to what we "think" we need! The job-fit and job/culture-fit M.O. is to build success models first, and then screen candidates on the basis of those success models.
That brings us to the second point, and that is, why use assessments? Simply because all of the research supports the idea that HR managers and other hiring professionals have less than 20% predictability from traditional hiring methods, of determining whether a candidate is a "good hire". A good hire is determined as someone who makes it past an early hire-failure period, and is ranked as an above average performer by their manager. Pre-hire assessments that meet satisfactory reliability and validity standards outperform intuitive resume, interview, hire, methods.
The last point of interest is that many of the problems in the use of even "good" assessments rests in the fact that the company has not clearly defined roles and expectations for employees, and therefore has inadequate measures of worker productivity. Bottom line is that the end goal is to increase productivity, ie, increase the throughput rate while decreasing the unit cost of throughput. You cannot do this effectively if you don't know how an employees job responsibilities directly contribute to throughput, and then assign quality measures for managing this.