Employee Assessment Best Practices: Stop Buying Flash, Start Demanding Science

In the assessment world, too many organizations get distracted by the shiny dashboards, colorful graphs, and sleek interfaces. Those features look great in a sales demo—but they don’t predict job performance.

At the end of the day, you’re not buying a platform. You’re buying the assessment. And if the engine under the hood is weak, no amount of flashy design will deliver meaningful results. It’s the difference between a Porsche body with a swinging machine engine—you’ll look good standing still, but you won’t get where you need to go.

The power comes from the science: validity, reliability, and research. Without it, you’re wasting money, risking compliance, and making hiring decisions on junk data.

“Flashy dashboards don’t make a valid assessment. Pretty graphs mean nothing without science under the hood—validity, reliability, adaptive design, and distortion detection. Stop buying the Porsche body with a Volkswagen engine.”

Employee Assessment Best Practices: Five Questions Every Buyer Should Ask

1. Can you send me your Technical Manual? Most vendors can’t. A proper technical manual should detail the test’s design, validation studies, reliability coefficients, and compliance standards. If they can’t produce one, that’s a red flag.

2. When was the last validity and reliability study conducted? Best practice calls for regular updates. Many providers haven’t refreshed their studies in 5–7 years, which means their claims may no longer hold up in today’s workforce. Outdated science equals outdated results.

3. Is the assessment Normative or Ipsative?

• Normative assessments compare candidates to a large reference group (a norm), making them predictive and legally defensible for hiring.

• Ipsative assessments force choices between options (like DISC-style), which are helpful for coaching and self-awareness, but cannot rank candidates against each other or predict job performance. If your vendor can’t answer this, they don’t understand the science they’re selling.

4. Is your assessment Adaptive or Fixed?

• Adaptive testing adjusts the difficulty of questions in real time based on candidate responses. This makes the assessment shorter, more accurate, and less fatiguing.

• Fixed assessments are long, rigid, and get increasingly complex. Once candidates reach their ceiling, they begin to guess to complete the task. That means up to 50% of the data can be inaccurate.

5. Does your assessment measure candidate distortion? This is critical. Without it, candidates can fake responses to match what they think you want. That’s like putting gibberish into Excel—you’ll still get a calculation, but the output is meaningless. A strong assessment detects and reports distortion so you know whether to trust the data.

“A flashy dashboard without science is just decoration. In assessments, what matters isn’t how it looks—it’s whether it works.”

John P. Beck, Jr., CEO - The Assessment Company®

Decision: Look Under the Hood

The next time you evaluate an assessment vendor, ignore the bells and whistles. Ask the tough questions. Demand the data. Because what matters isn’t how pretty the platform looks—it’s whether the assessment actually works. That’s where ROI comes from. That’s how you hire better, develop smarter, and keep top talent.

“This is what most employee assessments really are: shiny on the outside, weak on the inside. Stop buying dashboards. Start buying science.”

Ready to See What’s Under the Hood?

At The Assessment Company®, we don’t sell flash. We deliver data backed by science. With over 30 years of experience, validated tools, and compliance built in, we help organizations measure what matters—enabling them to make better hiring and development decisions.

For more information, call 1-800-434-2630 or visit us at www.theassessmentcompany.com.

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