Why are blended assessments best?

When considering a candidate for a position, traditional methods of assessment often fall short because they only test for one set of skills using one approach.  As humans, we rarely work on one thing in isolation or use just one skill at a time to achieve a task.  Work itself is not one dimensional, so why should an assessment of workplace performance be?

Why use a blended assessment?

As a combination of two or more assessment methods, blended assessments offer a more realistic reflection of a job itself.  At Cappfinity, our aim with blended assessment techniques was to get to the heart of multi-faceted human behaviour and simulate work in the most real way possible.

Bringing together multiple psychological constructs and task requirements, in the same way we utilise a blend of strengths, cognitive abilities and emotion in the workplace, makes the assessment ‘true’ to real life. This also emphasises the authenticity that is at the core of our assessment design and candidate experience.

Predicting long-term job success

All meta-analyses have shown that the unique information we are able to gain about each candidate increases when additional constructs are added to an assessment.

This has been evident from our clients’ results with Futuremark and Capptivate.  Less, is in fact, not always more, especially in the case of predictive assessments where combining assessment constructs and assessment types has led to greater predictive validity for the specific requirements of a role.

Measuring for multiple varied strengths

The more varied the opportunities are to gather evidence about a candidate, the more thorough the overall measurement of that candidate will be, providing you, as the recruiter with accurate performance data for a range of strengths as opposed to just one specific strength or skill.

Improving Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

It is well documented that minority demographic groups typically perform lower on specific types of assessment, that is, cognitive aptitude tests (Cottrell et al., 2015).

It follows that in mainstream recruitment processes, employers report a barrier to diversity through including cognitive assessments in their assessment flow, whilst needing to assess for these constructs as part of the role specification.

By replacing sequential, multi-stage processes with one-time measurement of all criteria, we mitigate losing minority groups at a specific “stage” (such as cognitive testing).

Blended assessment enables employers to take a more holistic view of a candidate’s suitability based on all relevant job-criteria, and with robust test design, whilst alleviating levels of adverse impact due to testing error or the adverse impact seen in traditionally designed cognitive aptitude tests.

Our work with blended assessment utilises a wide range of item-types to ensure the constructs within a success framework are measured in the most appropriate and accurate way possible. This is also the focus of ongoing research, as we continue to explore, validate and improve the best ways to assess specific constructs for predicting future job performance.

What impact is this having with clients?

We originally released our early research into the blended assessment approach in 2017, examining how the integration of multiple assessment types can increase fairness and the candidate experience.  We now have a further five years of data into the impact of this approach.

In summary, our aggregated data shows that utilising a blended approach to assessment:

Increases diversity – We have observed effect sizes between demographic groups decrease using a blended approach compared to a single-method approach

Increases face validity – Candidates consistently tell us their assessments feel more relevant, true to life and increase autonomy compared to traditional forms of assessment

Increases efficiency whilst maintaining quality – Blended assessments are typically time-compressed, and our data show they still deliver the same size of predictive relationships with outcome measures of interest.

Blended assessment presents an opportunity to dramatically enhance the robustness of the solutions we provide, as well as challenging the pitfalls that still exist with traditional single-construct assessment.

Assessment innovation is in a rich vein, and the opportunities presented by advances in data science, AI and machine learning will all help shape the predictive people analytics world of the future.

You can find out more about our blended assessment tool, Capptivate and how it could help your organisation here.