It’s a safe bet that anyone in “HR” has been inundated with content over the last year, with more and more pieces prophesying on the “future of work”. Typically, this “future” would reside far over the horizon, affording us the luxury of speculating over these shifts while having more than enough time to prepare for their inevitably. As with all major moments in human history, the rise of COVID-19 has precipitated changes in the world of work. Changes we knew were coming, but not quite this fast.

Among these changes, the need for automation and accessibility in the employment lifecycle. As businesses around the globe slowly open their doors the need to quickly and intelligently hire talent is paramount. Talent acquisition teams are understaffed and overworked, desperate for tools to help them sift through the mountains of candidates. Likewise, Managers are faced with the need to adapt to our new “normal” and require the tools to engage and develop their team in a fast-paced environment.

Our mission is to develop solutions for all of these issues, solutions built on assessments that are accessible and designed for our current time and our present challenges.

In this post, I’d like to give a preview of Traitify’s Cognitive assessment, designed to help hiring managers quickly determine a candidate's general mental ability. I’ll also spend a little time highlighting our Traitify Engage product, recently launched in May, designed to provide employees and managers with personalized development content that takes only minutes to deliver value.

The Traitify Cognitive Assessment

Over the last year, we’ve been developing an entirely new assessment designed to join our Big Five assessment in the mission of helping organizations hire the very best talent. Our Cognitive assessment has been designed to provide an engaging and quick experience for all candidates while delivering to hiring managers increased visibility into the candidate’s fit for a role.

When initially conceiving this new assessment, our team discussed what exactly we wanted to measure and decided that measuring general mental ability (GMA) was ideal, due to the fact that GMA correlates highly to other measures of cognitive ability such as verbal and numerical reasoning and provides additional insight into a candidate's trainability. GMA specifically looks at how a candidate absorbs, processes, and deploys information to solve problems and is less prone to bias than cognitive measures that rely on learned knowledge.

Of course, it was always a requirement that our Cognitive assessment be fast. For our initial version we will provide candidates with five minutes to complete the assessment. With future iterations focused on reducing the time it takes to complete the assessment, while still providing comprehensive results.

The assessment itself gives candidates the ability to try three practice questions before commencing the actual survey, which includes 15 questions of varying difficulty. Each question comprises a grid with various geometric designs, and one cell of the grid containing a ‘?’. The candidate is then asked to choose the correct answer from a pool of four possible cells.

Candidates will have the opportunity to skip questions and attempt them again if time permits. Following completion of the assessment, organizations will have the option to share insights with the candidate, including personalized strategies to improve their results when taking a cognitive measure in the future.

Hiring managers will see a unified fit score for candidates, which will comprise both the ideal levels on the Big Five assessment and Cognitive assessment for each role.

Traitify is currently in the process of testing this new assessment and expects to release the assessment later this year.

Engage and Develop

Learning and development has been a staple of corporate culture for decades, providing employees and managers with the tools to drive growth and performance, and has only increased in importance these last few months. Sadly, these tools have been unavailable, or rather not used with hourly employees. The rationale here is clear, in businesses with hourly workers time is of the essence and little to no time exists for the manager to interface with the employee for the purposes of development.

Tools for this audience (both employees and managers) need to be quick, accessible, and actionable, and it’s those priorities that have driven the development of our Traitify Engage solution.

One section of the Engage report that is particularly relevant during these times is the Success Skills. For those who find themselves furloughed or unemployed, the “Everyday Adjustments” provide positive strategies to thrive in current circumstances. It also has broader applications for employees who are looking for positive outlets during this time. Similarly, “Dealing with Stress” offers practical coping strategies built upon the employee’s personality, helping them to deal with stressful situations in a healthy and productive way.

To learn more about Traitify Engage, details can be found in my previous blog post.

A Platform, Built On Assessments

The wide-reaching applications of assessment data for candidates, employees, and managers is incredibly diverse, and we’re only starting to scratch the surface. With Traitify, you can now attract and guide candidates to openings they may have otherwise not known about (and perhaps are a better fit for) and equip hiring managers in finding the best talent based on personality and cognitive ability. With Traitify, you can finally grow and continuously engage your talent to ensure top performance and low turnover.

To learn more about our various assessments, connect with Traitify.