Written by Ash
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The benefits of talent assessment tools by far outweigh any cons they may have. From making better talent decisions to standardizing practices in hiring and promotions, talent assessments are vital in HR teams. There are, however, some operational problems that occur when organizations try to scale their use of assessment tools. These operational problems stem from the fact that when scaling, organizations often onboard more tools to suit different needs and end up with a disconnected ecosystem of assessments. Here, we explore how an assessment marketplace can be the solution when scaling assessment use
Introduction
With businesses moving towards streamlining, consolidation and integration, HR needs to look for these in their architecture. One particular area that has not moved in that direction is how organizations purchase and utilize talent assessments. This is because the traditional manner in which organizations procure their tools is from individual assessment providers. With the rise of the assessment marketplace, HR can look forward to a single platform in which all assessment needs can be met and overcome operational challenges by similarly adopting streamlining, consolidating, and integrating. Below are 3 key challenges faced when dealing with individual assessment providers and how the assessment marketplace overcomes them.
1. Onboarding Multiple Assessments
There exist multiple types of talent assessments in the market today like psychometrics, simulations, video interviews, etc. More and more companies are also looking at onboarding various types of these assessments to try and raise their talent decision validity. Although, the problem many organizations face is that individual vendors often only carry and specialize in a specific tool. Meaning, psychometric vendors mainly only have psychometric suites, and simulation companies only carry business simulations. The factor that causes an operational problem here is time. Specifically, the time it takes to source vendors of different specializations, evaluate the different stack of tools needed and then move into purchasing and implementation.
An assessment marketplace solves this problem by having multiple types of tools already available in its library. Above that, vendors of an assessment marketplace take care of the sourcing and evaluating stage by pre-qualifying the tools available on the platform. Therefore, organizations who opt for an assessment marketplace now need only to go onto the platform, select the different types of tools they’d like to use, and be assured that they are choosing the best-of-breed of each assessment type. Not only is the time to select shortened, but expertise in different types of assessments also sits with 1 vendor; therefore, support is readily available.
2. Managing Multiple Vendors
A byproduct of the problem above is another operational issue, which is redundant vendor management. While large organizations always have multiple vendors for different reasons, HR often gets into roadblocks when it comes to having multiple vendors for the same solution category without the ability to justify why. According to a Deloitte study, large HR departments on average, use 11-14 different systems at a time. If all these systems work in sync to deliver accurate results, there would be no problem; however, this amount of systems cannot be justified more often than not. That is when procurement or finance will deem the HR vendor management redundant. The other factor to consider is cost. Each vendor may come with its price point and packages, which are managed separately, making proving ROI difficult. It is also more challenging to achieve a bulk usage discount when split into multiple vendors.
A by-product of the problem above is another operational issue, which is redundant vendor management. While large organizations always have multiple vendors for different reasons, HR often gets into roadblocks when it comes to having multiple vendors for the same solution category without the ability to justify why.
According to a Deloitte study, large HR departments on average, use 11-14 different systems at a time. If all these systems work in sync to deliver accurate results, there would be no problem; however, this amount of systems cannot be justified more often than not. That is when procurement or finance will deem the HR vendor management redundant.
The other factor to consider is cost. Each vendor may come with its price point and packages, which are managed separately, making proving ROI difficult. It is also more challenging to achieve a bulk usage discount when split into multiple vendors.
An assessment marketplace solves this by enabling organizations to use multiple assessment tools yet only manage 1 vendor. This is because the provider of the assessment marketplace becomes the only vendor the organization has to deal with. HR teams can now customize tool selections to any use case and still not have problems with procurement or finance. Aside from that, all usage is calculated as 1. Therefore, organizations can now easily look at bulk prices which often come with discounts, thus resulting in massive cost savings.
3. Interpreting Multiple Reports
One of the most prominent challenges organizations faces when choosing to onboard multiple tools is interpreting multiple reports. This challenge does not just cause an operational problem of time wastage but also a strategic problem of inaccurate decision-making. Each tool that is onboarded will have its own reports with different terminologies, measurements, benchmarks, formats, implications, etc. The manual process of summarizing these reports into 1 is often lengthy and prone to mistakes. In many circumstances, line managers become resistant to assessments simply because the output is too confusing to process or the summary given does not help them hire better. The underlying problem here is each vendor’s data is treated as its own and the lack of technology to consolidate data and provide insights.
An assessment marketplace solves this by having an output engine built to pull data from multiple tools, understand the talent implications of that data then churn out a single consolidated report. Since an assessment marketplace already has pre-qualified tools onboard, each tool’s data is available and is intelligently combined by algorithms to produce 1 report, which serves as the single source of truth for HR and line managers. No longer does HR need to spend time manually consolidating different reports, and the accuracy of talent decisions is now improved using multiple tools with an accurate score interpretation.
The difference between an assessment marketplace and choosing individual assessment providers is summarized in the following table.
| Assessment Marketplace | Individual Assessment Provider | |
| Assessment Types | Multiple | Singular |
| Reports | Consolidated | Multiple |
| Data | Automated Consolidation | Manual Consolidation |
| Vendor Management | 1 | Possibly Multiple |
| Scalability | Low Investment | Costly |
| Integration | Possible | IP Challenges |
Additional Resources for Talent Assessment Tools
- Succession Planning
- Succession Planning e-Book
- Succession Planning Ultimate Guide
- Succession Planning Checklist
- Succession Planning Model
- Succession Planning Toolkit
- Succession Planning How To Avoid Promoting the Wrong Person
- Succession Planning HR Buyer’s Guide
- Succession Planning White Paper
- Poor Succession Planning
- Challenges Of Succession Planning
- Challenges With Assessment Tools
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