How to Set the Bar for Your Technical Assessments

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Recruiters are using technical assessments to reduce the number of candidates. But the question is which assessment tool to use and what score should be the border to cut-off candidates.

Find out more about the practices for setting up a technical bar in your assessments in this article.

  • Is your company performing job analyses on a regular basis?

According to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), performing job analysis is a process where you study a job, its responsibilities, and activities that are important for the performance of the job. This is probably the best place where you can start to develop and make technical assessments. 

  • Do you conduct validation studies of your assessments?

The simplest definition of validation is that validations represent the process of coming up with evidence and estimating how successful an assessment is. One test can be valid if you can back the scores of the candidate with some evidence.

To validate the technical assessments, you need to implement internal and external validation. The first one will ask you about the coding tasks, and the second one will estimate if the individual tasks are connected with the job.

  • Do you carry out adverse impact analyses for your assessments?  

Companies on a regular basis must carry out adverse impact analyses to ensure compliance with the EEOC and some other regulatory standards. This is to ensure that they do not discriminate against some groups that are legally protected: age, sex, and race. 

We strongly advise you to work with assessment research experts to set up the bar for your assessment because these are important analyses.

  • Do you have an expert team to do the assessment research?

To make effective assessments and to set up the bar at a fair level, you must have an expert team that will conduct the assessment research. Most of these researchers have formal training and knowledge on how do people react in the workplace. One of the organizations that carry out this kind of formal training is Industrial-Organizational Psychology.

  • Can the teams coordinate effectively with SMEs?

Another thing you must have if you want an effective technical assessment is coordination between the assessment research team and the engineering teams. They need to develop, validate, and improve the tests. So this is the reason why the assessment research team needs to work closely with the engineering team.