Every time you extend a job offer, you’re making a prediction. You’re betting the candidate will do the work well, stay past the six-month mark, click with their team and manager, and outperform everyone else you talked to. Finding, interviewing, and hiring top talent is hard, time-consuming, and expensive, and it all comes down to whether that one prediction is right.
The trouble is that the typical hiring inputs leave you guessing or hiring on a hunch.
- Resumes overstate involvement and inflate accomplishments.
- Skills highlight capabilities, not what someone likes to do or finds rewarding or satisfying.
- Experience shows you what a candidate has done, not what they’re capable of doing.
- References tend to be friendly voices painting a rosy picture.
- Unstructured interviews reward whoever is most charismatic in the room.
- Most interview questions are so generic anyone can practice the “right” answer.
None of this tells you who will be your next top performer and who will do the best work. These hiring tools don’t help you compare across candidates, whether someone will shine bright and perform at their best in the role, which means you’re left trying to make quality hiring predictions on thin, surface-level, and possibly inaccurate information.
That gap in hiring data is why so many companies add pre-hire testing, or pre-hire assessment, to the hiring process. Pre-employment assessments use structured questionnaires to measure what a resume can’t show, from cognitive ability and critical thinking to personality, work preferences, and motivation.
54% of organizations now use pre-hire assessments, and 78% say assessments improved the quality of their hires, according to SHRM. Used well, candidate assessments in recruitment give you high-quality, comparable information tied directly to what you’re trying to predict.
Pre-hire assessments help companies identify who will fit and stay
The whole point of using assessments during the candidate selection process is to get at more than charisma and a tidy skills checklist. A candidate can ace the interview and match every bullet on the job description and still be wrong for the role, because the things that decide whether someone stays and thrives — personality fit, work style, and motivation — rarely show up on paper.
Companies use hiring assessments to measure performance factors before they commit.
A capable person stuck in a role that fights their personality or natural motivational drive disengages, and a disengaged hire in a skilled seat is expensive to carry and expensive to replace. Whether someone will stay engaged and productive once they’re in the seat is the prediction a good assessment helps you get right.
This matters most for the roles with the widest ripple effect.
When you hire a people manager or someone who works across departments, their personality and work style shape the engagement and retention of everyone around them. This is why a manager compatibility mismatch often leads to unexpected and preventable turnover. Many of the hard and soft skills that make someone great in these roles stay hidden in a standard interview, which is what the right assessment can surface.
Types of candidate assessments used for hiring
Hiring assessment tools fall into a handful of categories, and while some assessments can fit multiple categories, each primarily measures a different piece of who someone is:
- Cognitive ability and intelligence tests measure reasoning, problem-solving, and learning speed. Instruments like the Predictive Index Cognitive Assessment and the Wonderlic and Raven’s Progressive Matrices tell you how quickly someone will get up to speed on work that changes faster than you can train for it.
- Knowledge and skill assessments check whether a candidate can do the specific tasks a role requires. Coding challenges, writing samples, licensure exams, and job simulations all sit in this category, and they answer the capability question more directly than any conversation will.
- Personality tests map traits and work preferences to how someone is likely to fit a team and a role. Hogan, Myers-Briggs, Enneagram, the Fascinate Test, and the Big Five describe a person’s default operating style, so you can anticipate how they’ll show up before you’ve ever worked alongside them.
- Behavioral assessments show how a person tends to act and respond in work situations. DISC, Culture Index, and the Predictive Index Behavioral Assessment focus on behavior under pressure, conflict, and change, which gives a team shared language for adapting how they communicate with each other.
- Strengths assessments surface what someone is naturally good at and where they add the most value. CliftonStrengths, Kolbe A Index, Working Genius, and VIA give people words for talents they’d been treating as unremarkable, which is often the first time someone sees their own capability clearly.
- Motivation assessments get at what drives a person and what keeps them engaged over the long haul. The WHY Institute’s Why Discovery assigns each person one of nine WHYs, while Motivation Code ranks intrinsic motivation across eight Motivational Dimensions from energizing to draining, so a manager can see which work someone will pour themselves into alongside what they’re capable of doing well.
The first five tell you what a person can do and how they operate. The last one gets at whether they’ll stay invested once they’re in the seat, and that is where the Motivation Code assessment, or MCode assessment, comes in. It identifies what naturally drives a person to bring their best to the table and the context and conditions that lead to their best work.
MCode’s Job Fit Report puts that motivational data — job fit, manager fit, and environment fit — to work in hiring. It predicts who will be energized by a role, the person who naturally performs at their best, goes above and beyond, collaborates well with their manager, and feels fulfilled in the seat.
What makes a hiring assessment worth trusting
Now, adding a test to your pre-hire process only helps if the test is any good, and a 2022 re-analysis in the Journal of Applied Psychology found that plenty of tools predict performance far less reliably than their reputations suggest.
Before you let an assessment tool impact who you hire, hold it to standards like:
- It has verified predictive validity, so it measures traits tied to the role itself and reliably forecasts performance.
- It produces comparable scores, so you can benchmark candidates against each other on the same scale.
- It stays consistent, so a candidate who retakes it scores about the same.
- It’s hard to game and screens for honesty, with no answers to look up online and no leading questions, so the result reflects who the candidate is.
- It works alongside your interviews, existing tools, and resume reviews.
- It comes with evidence from the publisher that its recommendations separate strong candidates from weak ones.
How you administer an assessment shapes what the results are worth:
- Untrained interpretation opens the door to bias, so train your HR team on what the tool measures and where its conclusions stop, or bring in a certified expert who knows the nuances of the tool.
- Assessments often measure a narrow slice of a person, so treat every score as one input among several, next to the conversations, references, and judgment calls that show you a whole candidate.
- Screening for culture match narrows your candidate pool and the range of thinking on your team, while the right assessment shows you how different people add different value.
- Employment law and privacy standards apply to every assessment you put in front of a candidate, so confirm your process complies and ask the publisher how their tool handles adverse impact.
One more thing worth weighing is the candidate’s experience. A long or clunky assessment can sour good people on the process, so the tool has to earn the time it asks for.
How to use MCode as a pre-hire assessment
The least used type of hiring assessment is a motivation-based assessment, even though motivation decides whether a capable person stays engaged. When Leadership IQ tracked more than 20,000 new hires, 89% of candidates who failed did so on attitude and motivation, against just 11% who failed due to skills.
Teams routinely test for skills, cognitive ability, and personality, while leaving the drive that keeps someone in the role to guesswork. The Motivation Code assessment focuses on exactly that gap, surfacing the motivational intelligence hiring managers need.
- The MCode assessment has each person describe four achievements from their own life and rank on a 1-10 scale what satisfied them about each experience. A proprietary algorithm then reads the motivational patterns in those stories to identify their MCode.
- There’s nothing to look up online and no leading questions to game, because the raw material is a person’s own experience. This is what makes MCode’s result so accurate and hard to fake.
- The Motivation Code framework maps 32 Motivations across 8 Motivational Dimensions, drawn from 65+ years of research and more than 1.8 million analyzed achievement stories, so the scores hold up as validated, comparable predictors.
The assessment and Job Fit report work alongside the interviews and skills tests you already run, adding motivational intelligence to your candidate profiles.
In hiring, that data powers the Job Fit Report.
- You give it the job description, answer a few questions, and provide the MCodes of your candidates and their hiring manager.
- Then, our proprietary AI-powered tooling compares them to score job fit, manager fit, and environment fit for each candidate.
- The report goes past the scores to explain them. It shows where each candidate will thrive and where they’ll struggle, where they’ll collaborate well or clash with their manager, and what they need from their environment to do their best work.
- It also provides interviewers custom questions built around the specific concerns for each person, then ranks all candidates by overall fit.
The candidate experience holds up, too, which often surprises people.
MCode takes longer than a quick quiz, so candidates tend to balk at first, but once they get their report, the feedback shifts, and they tell our customers it’s the most useful thing they took from the whole process: A clear picture of what drives them that helps determine whether they get this job or the next one.
Predict hiring success with motivational intelligence
Every hire comes down to a prediction, and that prediction is only as good as the data behind it. Skills and cognitive tests tell you what a person can do. A motivation assessment tells you whether they’ll want to keep doing it, which is what separates a hire who lasts from one who’s gone by year two.
Curious what a motivation assessment tells you about a candidate?
Take the MCode motivation assessment and see your own results, explore how the Job Fit Report scores job fit, manager fit, and environment fit, or book a demo to see a sample report and how the process works. Add motivational intelligence to the mix, and every hiring prediction you make gets more accurate.
