Best practices in hiring: SHL’s Approach to Selection Assessments

Thank you for considering SHL as your partner for selection assessments. Making the right hiring and promotion decisions can result in a number of positive business outcomes for your organization, including cost savings, increased productivity, and greater employee retention. SHL's suite of assessments and its professional consulting services can help organizations establish hiring and promotion processes with demonstrated validity and the potential for a positive return on investment. Ultimately these enhanced selection processes can help organizations identify and retain top talent and have a positive impact on business results. This document describes the benefits of using assessments and SHL's best practice recommendations for appropriate identification and use of assessments in a hiring process. These recommendations are based on our extensive experience in assessment design and implementation, combined with current professional and legal guidelines in this area. When deciding to use assessments, organizations will find numerous assessment products and vendors on the market that vary considerably in terms of quality and applicability. Ideally, organizations should use tools that will increase the likelihood of hiring candidates who will perform well on the job – thus leading to demonstrable economic returns. An assessment or hiring process that is poorly designed or implemented may be no more effective at identifying a successful job candidate than the flip of a coin. The impact of poor hiring decisions can have expensive and far-reaching outcomes, such as increased employee replacement and training costs, or increased legal liability. Organizations that carefully choose assessments and related services that best meet their needs will have a clear competitive advantage. Benefits of identifying and using well-developed, valid and consistently applied assessments for selecting employees may include: Making better, more defensible hiring decisions based on objective data • Increasing the productivity of the workforce and profitability of the employer • Improving job fit and reducing employee attrition • Reducing unnecessary human resources costs by reserving more costly interviewing • and background screening steps for candidates who are successful on the assessments Decreasing the likelihood that candidates will file justifiable complaints about the • process Presenting a positive, professional image of an organization to job candidates • An assessment or hiring process that is poorly designed or implemented may be no more effective at identifying a successful job candidate than the flip of a coin. Business leaders often ask for evidence to prove that using assessments for hiring employees is worth the investment. …