Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Rocket-hire releases 5th annual survey results

I don't usually link to a single article, but this is an exception. Every year, Rocket-Hire and our friend Dr. Charles Handler release the results of an annual survey on the usage of online screening and assessment tools. This year marks the fifth survey and it's got some interesting results based on responses from 141 recruiting and hiring professionals:

1. Many, if not most, organizations are using an ATS. For large organizations (5,000+ employees), usage was 100%.

2. Surprisingly, many organizations are not using online qualification prescreening. Only 47% ask about basic qualifications while only 24% ask about technical skills or certifications. Why surprising? Because it's one thing ATSs tend to be decent at.

3. Use of personality measures as an assessment tool jumped in the last five years from 21% to 59% (which certainly matches the interest I'm seeing). In fact, they were the most popular assessment tool reported, followed closely by skills/knowledge tests. Least used? Simulations and online interviews. I see lots of potential in the former as our technology improves.

4. Assessment tools in general are more widely used than they were five years ago. "Fit" measures went from 29% to 40%, cognitive ability tests from 26% to 41%, and skills/knowledge tests leaped from 12% to 56%. This is good news indeed (assuming the tests are good!).

5. Unfortunately only 27% of users of prescreening tools and 36% of assessment users collect metrics to measure their success. Those that did were much more likely to find these measures effective. Hey, you can't know if you don't measure!

There's a lot more in the article (e.g., take a look at biodata usage). By the way, full results and analysis will be in the May issue of the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership.

2 comments:

Julie Gibbons said...

Hi Bryan - I thought you might be interested - We wanted to test the stats from the 2006 Rocket-Hire Survey which stated that over 65% of companies used personality measures, so we asked our jobseekers to let us know if they'd been asked to complete any personality testing by their employers, and found that from the just over 2500 respondents, 49% had been asked to complete personality-centric psychometric testing for their job. Interesting to see it bear out there or thereabouts from the other side of the employment fence?

You can see the full breakdown at http://peoplemaps.com/main/2008/03/26/personality-profiling-in-the-workplace-how-common-is-it/

Cheers
Julie

BryanB said...

Thanks Julie! That is interesting! And for folks out there, peoplemaps has a blog at http://peoplemaps.com/main/blog/

as well as a very cool Facebook application here: http://apps.facebook.com/peoplemaps/