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If you’re into brown, blue and green you ought to go be a doctor or a forest ranger. See how easy picking a career is when you know your colors?

Like white? Then interior decorating is for you. (Too easy. Everyone knows white goes with everything.)

How about if your favorite colors happen to be black and red and orange? Maybe you just really like Halloween. Otherwise, you are “The Evaluator,” says a press release from CareerBuilder (profile; site), which just added a color wheel (parked on the old CareerPath.com website) to help jobseekers better assess their personality.

Before we get scolded for making light of a serious assessment tool let us note that the Color Career Counselor has been scientifically vetted with the results published in the North American Journal of Psychology. You can read the paper here, but fair warning: it’s full of the kind of statistical analysis we avoided in college.

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Back in 2006 I wrote an article discussing the integration of assessments into job boards. It was an example of the continued movement toward the inclusion of assessments into the mainstream of recruiting and hiring products and systems.

In this article, I praised the progress being made in understanding the value of quality assessment products in the modern hiring process.

I strongly believe that the words I wrote in 2006 are as relevant today as they ever were; in fact, they are more relevant now than ever. The days of the big job boards and their keyword matching strategies are numbered.

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Big news from Monster (profile; site) today. It bought jobmatcher Trovix (profile; site) for $72.5 million; settled that class action shareholder lawsuit over the stock options backdating for $25 million, and managed to beat Wall Street’s expectations for its 2nd quarter financial performance, earning 40 cents a share excluding one-time expenses. The Street consensus was the company would earn 37 cents a share.

Total revenue grew 9% to $354 million, from $324 million in the comparable quarter of 2007, boosted by a favorable exchange rate. Even without the benefit of the exchange rate Monster grew revenue by 4 percent. Wall Street analysts had estimated revenues would come in at $361 million.

International sales fueled the company’s growth during the quarter, as it has for the past year. While revenue from North American operations fell by $10 million during the quarter to $164 million. But sales elsewhere in the world jumped 34 percent (23 percent when you exclude the effect of currency exchange rates). International sales now account for 44 percent of company revenue.

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Larry Horton, a police-officer-turned-recruiter for the Phoenix police department, talks about one of his favorite of the general job boards (hint: it’s not Monster, CareerBuilder, or HotJobs). He also discusses the part of the U.S. where he’s finding the most physically fit applicants; his employer brand, and more. keep reading…

Time and again I read recommendations for evaluating quality of hire. Ask the managers, ask the employees, ask an astrologer. None of these things will ever give you more than a subjective opinion about the kind of information you need to improve the quality of hire. Here’s why.

Imagine advertising for superheroes. There are a dozen steroid-pumped, ego-centric applicants sitting in your waiting room wearing masks, capes, and tights. Each hero claims to have saved the world at one time or another. You hire three of them. Six months later, how do you evaluate your quality of hire?

Evaluating quality of hire requires looking at performance in a different way. It requires mentally separating the “how” from “what.” The “how” represents what the superhero says or does and “what” represents the outcome. Here is the hard part to accept: evaluating quality of hire depends almost entirely on evaluating “how” the hero performed the job, not the outcome. Regardless of opinions to the contrary, “how” is the only part of the job under the hero’s control. It is the only thing separating one hero from another.

Here is an example that may explain this idea.

It’s a particularly bad time on earth. Asteroid showers are occurring periodically, keeping the super-heroes busy. When he was on duty, Clock-Man reacted by turning back time. On her shift, Wonder Woman pulled the asteroids into new orbits with her lasso. And when it was his turn, Superman flew faster than a speeding bullet, smashing them into smithereens. The “what” was the same for all three: reversing time. Using lassos and brute force were all examples of “how.”

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Hiring people is rarely based on objective evidence and is, perhaps, the least-objective activity that organizations participate in.

When we see a candidate who meets a large number of our pre-existing conditions for employment (i.e., a candidate who has gone to a school our hiring manager likes; has worked at a couple of well-respected companies; or has written the right key words on his resume), we have already hired him in our minds.

Interviews are examples of how easy it is to abandon the tools of objectivity, the scientific method, logic, and the rules of evidence, for our “gut” or for “chemistry.”

While there is considerable evidence showing that testing candidates is far more likely to predict successful performance, we still rely almost exclusively on interviews. Though numerous researchers have pointed out the need to gather a variety of data about a candidate, we generally settle for an application form and an interview.

Why are we so resistant to testing and other more objective sources of data?

Perhaps it is because our expectations, preconceptions, and prior beliefs pretty much always influence our interpretation of new information. Experiments conducted over and over have shown that we see what we expect to see and conclude what we expect to conclude.

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Article and research by Charles Handler and Mark C. Healy

For the last five years, Rocket-Hire has surveyed talent-management professionals who use Web-based screening and assessment products to enhance and quantify their hiring processes. Our goal for this research is to document trends in the usage of online screening and assessment tools in order to help provide a clear understanding of the popularity of these tools and their perceived positive and negative attributes.

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The phone rings. Someone on the other end says he or she wants to build (or buy) a Web-enabled hiring test. Let’s say it will be for salespeople (generally the caller is a recruiter or HR manager, but sometimes he or she is a gopher).

After discussing the idea for a few minutes, I make a few suggestions. These always include following the ‘Guidelines’ to make sure the test is based on job requirements and business necessity and following the ‘Standards’ to make sure the test actually predicts job performance.

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Every year, I take a few minutes to reflect on the things I have noticed while working with both producers and consumers of screening and assessment tools. Overall, I am very encouraged by what I have been seeing. The market for screening and assessment tools continues to grow. This makes me extremely happy because we I/O psychologists know the value that is to be had via the use of quality assessment tools.

The science geek in me is also very happy to see strong investment in innovation. I am really pleased to see the ways in which quality content is being combined with technology to collect the mountains of data that are required to uncover underlying truths about the relationship between human traits and job performance.

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Every so often, I come across shameful hiring information included in newsletters. I always thought journalists were supposed to research their facts; however, in a recent career newsletter, there were three articles that immediately got my attention. If any readers come across articles like these, may I suggest you flame the author for reporting pure nonsense to both recruiter and applicant.

Secret Documents

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Get used to it: unless your organization hires everyone who applies, you are testing. Some people (even attorneys who should know better) vigorously deny that their organizations test applicants (pssst?interviews are tests!).

Whether an organization uses verbal questions or written questions, they both have the same objective: to separate qualified applicants from unqualified ones before spending big bucks on salary, benefits, and potential lawsuits. Tests are tests.

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No facet of assessment has experienced as much change over the past decade as has the reporting of candidates’ results. Those of us who worked with assessment back in the dark ages can attest to the frustration experienced with the reporting of assessment results.

In those days the following were the norm:

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We I-O psychologist-types tend to be real data hounds. Much of the work we do for our employers/clients involves the use of data to investigate specific hypotheses in order to illuminate the underlying truth in a situation. The outcome of this work often has tremendous value to organizations because it provides them with hard data on which strategic decisions can be based. Additionally, the collection and analyses of data often helps us to identify new trends that we haven’t yet thought about.

Many of you who follow my articles know that I have a keen interest in the pre-employment assessment industry, and write quite a bit about its trends and happenings within. My interest in data and trends has led to an annual online screening and assessment usage survey.

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One of the most difficult aspects of using assessment lies in gaining an understanding of the various pricing models associated with it. This understanding is critical when it comes time to budget for an assessment program. Even if your organization has experience using assessment, budgeting can be a very difficult issue.

Budgeting for assessment can be hard because of the following:

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There was an interesting story in the July 19 edition of Time about Dodge & Cox, the San Francisco-based mutual fund company. Here’s the opening paragraph. You might want to take the same approach they use when investing in stocks as you do when assessing your candidates:

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A few years ago, the top talent acquisition challenge most companies were facing was online assessment tools. Screening and assessment tools have been gaining steam over the past few years as companies are investing their resources into new ways to look more closely at their applicants for both skills and behaviors. This webinar covered some of the tools that are used by today’s leading organizations and defined the difference between Screening and Assessment.

This topic was so popular, we decided to follow-up with a survey. Some of the more interesting findings include:

• 71% of companies differentiate between screening and assessment
• 53% of companies use online assessment tools for skills, behaviors, and cultural fit
• 92% of companies don’t employ an in-house I/O psychologist

Once a week I get called by someone, usually an administrative assistant, asking if I have a personality test. When I try to get more information, she usually tells me her boss wants the test and she just wants the price.

I tell her, “Sorry. I sell solutions, not tests.”

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Sure, it’s easy to say engineering, legal, IT, or actuarial jobs require technical degrees. People in these professions need a substantial amount of education to practice their trade. But we all know from watching folks in these professions that it takes more than a sheepskin to be successful. Sometimes, it takes certain personality factors to make a good job fit.

Job performance is a two-sided coin. On one side, all the hard skills required for the job, and on the other, all the social factors. For the purpose of this article, we’ll assume personality is on the social factor side.

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Applying for a job isn’t very satisfying for many an applicant. Application processes are often shrouded in mystery because they represent a one-way flow of information that requires the candidate to provide information to a potential employer without receiving much in return.

It’s too bad, because both research and common sense indicate that the manner in which applicants are treated during the hiring and on-boarding process can have an impact on long-term outcomes such as organizational commitment and turnover.

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In seeking to create an effective hiring strategy, there’s a continuum that dictates the key attributes that should be measured in applicants. Finding the right point on this continuum is the key to ensuring that hiring supports an organization’s strategic goals and objectives.

This article provides an overview of the relevance of the two end points on this continuum to organizational hiring strategies as well as some information about how assessment can be used to support these strategies.

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