Assessing Skills One at a Time Is Costing You Better Hires

Most hiring assessments break communication, empathy, active listening, and problem-solving into separate scores. The problem is that frontline employees don’t use those skills separately. They use them together during real conversations with customers.

HiringBranch takes a different approach. Candidates respond to open-ended scenarios using their own voice or writing, giving employers a better look at how they would actually handle the job.

In this episode, Assaf Bar-Moshe talks about new HiringBranch research showing that evaluating skills together can be more accurate than scoring each skill individually. He also explains how HiringBranch turns real job responsibilities into assessment scenarios and uses performance data to improve those assessments over time.

Key Takeaways:

1. Empathy alone doesn’t make someone good at customer service. They also need to understand the problem, communicate clearly, and help move the customer toward a solution.
2. Open-ended assessments require candidates to respond in their own words. There are no multiple-choice answers pointing them toward what the employer wants to hear.
3. HiringBranch found a stronger connection to human judgment when skills were evaluated together instead of scored one at a time.
4. The right response depends on the job, customer, industry, location, and situation. Context matters when deciding what good communication looks like.
5. Better assessments start with what employees actually do every day. HiringBranch turns those responsibilities and conversations into scenarios candidates are likely to face on the job.

Guest:

Assaf Bar-Moshe, Chief Research and Development Officer at HiringBranch

Connect with Assaf on LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/in/assaf-bar-moshe-3807738/

William Tincup, Co-founder of WRKdefined and host of the You Should Know podcast

Resources: Get the report that Assaf talks about, Accurately Measuring Skills: Isolated vs Multi-Skill Scoring to Predict Performance https://bit.ly/HiringBranch Chapters: 00:25 Meet Assaf and HiringBranch 01:10 Assessing frontline communication roles 02:07 How open-ended assessment scenarios work 03:42 William’s retail customer service story 04:40 The value of scenario-based assessments 05:20 What HiringBranch evaluates 06:20 Measuring language, communication, and soft skills 07:19 Personality testing versus linguistic analysis 09:12 Assessing integrity, grit, creativity, and adaptability 11:21 How acceptable responses are determined 12:20 The new HiringBranch research 13:18 The challenge of measuring empathy 14:45 Why soft skills need context 16:07 Comparing machine learning scores with human judgment 17:07 Evaluating skills together 18:45 Connecting assessment scores to job performance 20:54 Turning job descriptions into conversation flows 22:27 Working with bad job descriptions 23:54 Using customer transcripts and recruiter input 24:52 Building more adaptable assessments 26:30 Where to find the research

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