Pre-Hire Assessments: Why Frontier Signal is Leading the Way

Prospective clients often ask us what did we discover in our research that went into our product which is different from other pre-hire assessments in the market?

Our Research

Our team of psychometricians dedicated a year to the review of academic literature, including the  Mental Measurements Yearbook on the topic of hiring best practices and career outcomes. We reviewed over 100 pre-hire and post-hire career assessments and 1,000 items based on the hypothesis that “signals” related to skills, experience, preferences, motivations, and personality can be measured independently to create a holistic assessment.

Our Findings

• Only approximately one-third of pre-hire assessments and one-half of post-hire assessments have sufficient evidence to prove their reliability and validity.
• The Mental Measurements Yearbook also revealed that several of the assessments psychological associations published were deemed either unreliable or invalid due to insufficient empirical evidence.
• The constructs that pre-hire surveys assess – career beliefs, aptitude, academic achievement, interests, personality, and values - are proven to be significant predictors of post-hire constructs – job satisfaction, employee engagement, and career success. 
• There is a dearth of comprehensive assessments that measure multiple constructs. Only 5% of the pre-hire assessments and 4% of the post-hire assessments claim to measure more than one of the pre-hire or post-hire constructs.  
• Providing more comprehensive assessments for career guidance would be useful since all the top-level factors that pre-hire surveys assess are predictive of post-hire outcomes.

Our Assessment 

Based on our hypothesis we found no assessment that measures all the Signals together. Such an assessment could have provided evidence as to whether these are separate constructs. We concluded there is also no evidence to show that these are not independent constructs. 

We tested this hypothesized relationship between the signals and the post-hire constructs with factor analyses. Our survey reliably revealed 5 latent signals with Cronbach’s Alpha values all exceeding industry standards. Polychoric correlation and Cronbach’s Alpha analyses confirm that our survey is primarily composed of non-redundant and effective questions. We ran a set of standard correlation analysis - Pearson, Point-Biserial, and Phi - on our survey questions and found that our survey questions do not demonstrate bias association with gender, age, and race.

Also, as a result of our research, we uncovered a pivotal detail that is the foundation of our talent assessment—that an individual’s job satisfaction and exemplary performance are predicted by the job context defined by a set of attributes—skills, experience, preferences, motivations, and personality. Context is within a job, team, and organization. Replace one and it shifts the paradigm for success and job fit.

Job Applicants Say

The assessment allowed me to showcase my strengths, dig into how I think and tackle problems.

I am experiencing how hiring is broken. I don’t like hiring screens that only measure technical competence. I liked how the assessment delved into my work habits and how I would fit in and excel within a team. This fit should be captured much earlier in the hiring process.

I liked the difference in answering additional questions and going through attributes related to the job. Frontier Signal has a meaningful and special way to apply, which I find refreshing.

Your assessment allows time for self-reflection and provides an honest opportunity to assess yourself. A game-changer for recruiting. 

Companies wait too long into the hiring process to assess fit. It is enormously more valuable earlier in the hiring process.