It’s no secret that hiring leaders can make or break employing organizations, and the risks associated with mishiring are significant. At junior levels, poor quality of hire is a frustration, but rarely is it an existential threat to the organization itself.
Senior hires, however, can cause serious and irreparable harm to their employing organizations when done badly and should be avoided at all costs. The best way to minimize the likelihood of senior mishires is to thoroughly assess prospective candidates and then develop successful applicants to their fullest potential.
In this article, I will outline best practices and evidence-based recommendations for assessing leaders, helping to identify and develop senior-level hires.
Assessing for Recruitment
When assessing leaders for recruitment purposes, organizations should focus predominantly on cognitive and behavioral assessment. Although interviews are essential recruitment tools, they are very poor indicators of cognitive ability and most personality traits (other than interpersonal skills). This means that interviews inevitably fail to capture the characteristics that organizations truly care about and those that academic research suggests are intrinsically related to leadership performance.
Cognitive assessments measure a candidate’s level of general cognitive ability, which underpins a person’s ability to learn, solve problems, and make decisions. In cognitively complex work, they are the strongest predictors of performance that we know of, and the more cognitively complex the role, the stronger the prediction of performance.
Although psychometric tests are typically associated with junior hires, they actually add more value for senior hires, as problem-solving and decision-making are particularly important here.
Behavioral assessments serve as the perfect complement to cognitive assessments, capturing the soft skills required for optimal leadership performance. Certain behavioral characteristics are essential to effective leadership, including resilience, emotional intelligence, assertiveness, and industriousness. Because we can’t measure these during an interview, behavioral assessments are the best way to ensure these characteristics are accounted for in the recruitment process.
Assessing for Development
When it comes to assessing leaders for development, the rules change. Cognitive assessments are effectively useless for development purposes, as cognitive ability simply cannot be developed.
Moreover, knowing your level of cognitive ability offers no insight into where to focus development efforts, making the exercise futile. Instead, organizations should focus their efforts on behavioral assessments and potentially hard skills or knowledge-based assessments.
Behavioral assessments are commonly used as development tools, but not for the reasons you might intuitively think. Like cognitive ability, personality cannot be “improved” through training and development, but unlike cognitive ability, behavioral traits do provide valuable information for development.
Typically, organizations develop elaborate competency frameworks, which are inherently behavioral indicators of performance. Competency assessments, therefore, help identify relative strengths and weaknesses, shaping development plans. For example, if social skills are a core competency and you discover that these skills are lacking, this should be where development is focused, giving your plan structure.
Skills and knowledge assessments also serve as diagnostic tools, identifying areas of weakness. For example, skills tests could be used to identify weaknesses in specific areas of expertise, such as finance, marketing, sales, or strategy.
Once these weaknesses have been identified, training and development can be focused on these core development needs, streamlining professional development. This also saves time and money, as unnecessary training can be avoided, making them powerful cost-saving tools.
Conclusion and Recommendations
The impact of leaders cannot be overstated, and even small performance improvements tend to cascade throughout the organization. Consequently, organizations should move away from relying solely on interviews to screen leadership candidates and diversify their selection tools.
Similarly, after hiring, organizations should use diagnostic tools to identify areas of strength and weakness, helping to focus their learning and development budgets. However, organizations must recognize that leadership assessments for recruitment and those for development can be quite different, and adapt their strategies accordingly.
