By Dan Harrison, Ph.D.
For most jobs, suitability factors are about 50% of the job success factors. Therefore, effectively measuring suitability is an essential part of assessment. However, suitability is much more difficult to measure than eligibility. The first challenge is to determine which suitability factors relate to job success for a particular job. However, even when that is determined, to accurately assess job suitability you also need to formulate how different levels of each suitability factor will impact job success. For example, you may determine that self-motivation is an important factor for job success for a particular job. But you still need to quantify how each level of self-motivation will impact success in order to calculate the results. For example, if the person scores a 5 out of 10 on self motivation, you need a means to designate how that will impact overall job success for the specific job. For some jobs, the more self-motivation the person has the better. However, for other jobs, a moderate level is enough and high levels do not relate to increased performance. Each level of each factor needs to be scored according to its impact on performance.
How do I know which behavioral factors relate to success for a particular job? It is not an easy task to determine this, especially to determine how different levels of those factors will impact job success. That is why it can be very useful to have access to behavioral research that identifies not only the behavioral factors that impact job success for different job types, but also how different levels of those factors should be scored. Harrison Assessments contains 20 years of performance based research regarding suitability factors and their impact on performance for different jobs. It enables you to clearly see which traits are essential, which traits are desirable, and which traits should be avoided. Unlike most behavioral research which examines the norms or average traits for people in the job, the Harrison research focuses on the traits that differentiate the high performers from the low performers. Some research focuses only on high performers, but this also is not effective because it assumes that the low performers don’t have the same trait which is often not the case. Consequently, it is extremely likely to reduce the accuracy by introducing a significant number of factors into the assessment are not related to performance. Therefore, the research needs to identify the traits that differentiate the high performers from the low performers for that specific job type.
© 2008. Harrison Assessments Int’l 5
