Hiring good leaders improves the dynamics among team members and significantly increases work efficiency. Unfortunately, identifying candidates with outstanding leadership skills when conducting interviews isn’t the easiest task. To solve this challenge, several hiring managers and businesses are turning to leadership skills assessments.
So, what are these assessments, and why are they a popular solution for finding leadership potential? Join us as we discuss leadership assessment tests in detail, what they entail, and how they can work for you. But first…
What are leadership skills?
Leadership skills are qualities needed to successfully guide a team towards a particular goal. These skills involve the capacity to carry people along and offer the required support or motivation needed to accomplish a collective mission.
Knowing what skills constitute a good leader is the first step to ensuring you conduct proper leadership assessment tests and select the best applicant. To this end, let’s consider some leadership skills you should look out for when hiring.
- Communication: A 2023 Haiilo study found that 75% of employees view effective communication as the top leadership attribute. Good leaders should be able to define team goals and foster motivation clearly. Hence, test for skills like active listening, empathy, and respectful body language as they indicate high emotional intelligence and strong communication abilities.
- Decision-making: A sound leader should be able to discern the best way forward when issues arise. To rate a candidate’s decision-making process, note how carefully they weigh their options when faced with a seemingly difficult choice. Most importantly, evaluate their solutions and how they impact others, as these determine the quality of their decisions.
- Tenacity: Considering the various challenges organizations face, you want a leader who can confidently face any downtimes. Remember, the leader’s reaction when faced with challenges dictates the actions of other team members. So, a leader must take responsibility first to encourage team members and boost their morale.
- Ethics: A good leader must be the first to uphold rules and regulations and also encourage others to keep them. With this attitude, the team is more likely to trust their leader and follow their guidance or direction.
- Delegation: Delegating tasks is a necessity for businesses to thrive. It allows leaders to prioritize and oversee the most important tasks while assigning other tasks to team members. By doing so, they can maximize productivity and timely delivery while encouraging growth.
Having employees with these skills creates a positive work environment, which promotes higher productivity and efficiency. Thus, hiring capable leaders is vital to achieving better results and, ultimately, business success.
What is a leadership skill assessment?
A leadership skill assessment is a test that evaluates an individual’s ability to lead using questions that prompt reactions to various scenarios. Each question depicts different skills, depending on the leadership qualities needed. Then, the candidates’ responses tell you how much of that skill they possess, thus identifying the more promising leaders.
With these responses, you can select and interview only the best candidates, allowing you to hire fast and efficiently.
Common leadership tests
Below, we’ll discuss four of the most common leadership tests used today and what they assess. While these 4 are common leadership tests; psychometric, personality, and general cognitive testing do not predict on-the-job performance or test skills in context.
It is important to note, psychometric and personality tests do not determine an individual’s skill level and discount an individual’s learned abilities.They may also sway you to hire similar profiles to that of your current team, doing very little to encourage diversity and inclusion. With Vervoe’s skills assessments, you can avoid those biases and hire the person who performs the best in the job, irrespective of their personality profiling.
Psychometric tests may have a place post-hire. For example, once you know a candidate has the skills to do the job, you could use personality tests to see how candidates like to be managed, where they could fit within your team dynamic, what their learning style is, what sort of manager they are, and so on.
1. DISC Assessment
The DISC assessment measures behavioral patterns in four categories: Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, and Conscientiousness. First, the Dominance and Influence sections ascertain how confidently candidates approach tasks and influence others, respectively. Next, the Steadiness category judges dependability, while Conscientiousness shows their attention to detail and quality of results.
2. Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)
The MBTI classifies people into one of 16 personality types based on four characteristics. They include Extraversion vs. Introversion, Sensing vs. Intuition, Thinking vs. Feeling, and Judging vs. Perceiving. These yardsticks measure how candidates interact with others, process information, make decisions, and communicate those decisions.
3. Emotional Intelligence (EI) Assessment
EI assessments evaluate one’s level of emotional awareness, determining their ability to handle emotions and understand others. Key components of this test include self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills.
4. Energy Leadership Index (ELI)
The ELI assesses personalities across seven energy levels, from negative (levels 1-2) to positive (levels 3-7). Then, depending on responses to a series of questions, the test shows energy distributions across these levels. For example, it shows you whether a candidate’s reaction in a situation is angry and uncooperative (level 2) or accommodating (level 5).
Although these tests are common, psychometric, personality, and general cognitive testing, fail to predict on-the-job performance or test skills in context. Psychometric and personality tests don’t determine an individual’s skill level and discount their learned abilities. Also, they may sway you to hire similar profiles to that of your current team, doing little to encourage diversity and inclusion.
With Vervoe’s skills assessments, you can avoid those biases and hire the person who performs best in the job, irrespective of their personality profiling. Then, psychometric tests may come in post-hire. For example, once you know a candidate has the skills to do the job, you could use personality tests to see how they would like to be managed. You could also gain insight into how they fit within your team dynamic or their learning and management styles.
What is the purpose of a leadership assessment?
The main purpose of a leadership assessment is to ascertain how suitable a person is for a leadership role. Personalities differ, which means that people’s capacity to lead also varies. Leadership assessments give you quick, accurate insight into your candidates’ behavioral tendencies and how they’re likely to perform in a managerial position.
Let’s look at a few additional benefits you stand to gain by implementing leadership skills assessments into your interview process.
1. Reduced hiring mistakes
Making leadership skills assessments a standard part of your hiring procedure removes room for sentiment or bias. Most times, your likes and preferences tend to influence interviews and hiring decisions heavily. This creates room for hiring mistakes where the candidate you favor isn’t the best for the job.
Rather than relying on interviews only, leadership assessments help you make a decision based on consistent criteria and data-driven insights. Due to the objective nature of these tests, you can select and hire the most suitable candidate for a role instead of leaning on the interviewer’s inclinations alone.
2. Higher productivity
Under good leadership, people are more engaged, active, and pumped to handle tasks. With this added motivation and a positive attitude, your employees will be more interested in hitting the company’s goals and ready to put in the necessary work. Naturally, this, in turn, leads to higher productivity and efficiency in your organization, eventually creating impressive results and achievements.
3. Leadership development
From online courses to business schools and internal company training, we’ve all stumbled upon the occasional leadership development program. Regardless of their popularity, several people still lack leadership skills, including people in managerial positions. A 2023 study by Zippia showed that only 48% of employees view their company’s leadership as “high quality.”
With leadership assessments, you can see your employees’ personality strengths and weaknesses and consequently know where to channel your leadership training efforts.
For example, if you notice that many good candidates have less-than-ideal responses in situations that require adequate communication, you can organize workshops to address this problem. This way, you’ll maintain a steadily improving leadership culture in your organization.
The pitfalls with traditional interview processes on leadership skills assessments
Leadership skills assessments are becoming increasingly popular, but traditional hiring processes like interviews are still the norm in several organizations. So, are there disadvantages of traditional hiring processes and are they harmful with respect to leadership assessments? The short answer is yes.
In this section, we’ll see five dangers of traditional interview processes on leadership skill assessment.
1. Bias
One of the obvious problems with interviews is bias, whether on a subconscious or totally conscious level. Unfortunately, during interviews, people tend to favor certain personality types and, sometimes, individual candidates for various reasons.
Whether it be appearance, gender, or behavior, certain traits that appeal to interviewers don’t necessarily determine leadership competency. This bias could make an interviewer overlook a more qualified candidate in favor of their personal choice.
2. Inconsistency
Unlike standardized assessment tests, traditional interviews provide an unintentional opening for inconsistency in the questions being asked. This is most likely to happen when there are different interviewers and poor feedback between them.
As a result, the interviewers may ask different questions or prioritize different values even with the same questions. The lack of standardization causes interviewers to draw unfair or unreliable conclusions, which could be detrimental to the organization, as the candidates don’t receive equal evaluation.
3. Time constraints
According to Indeed, in-person interviews last an average of 45 minutes to an hour and a half. This may not be a problem with one or two people, but with multiple candidates, it becomes inefficient and time-consuming. Even worse, the interviewer may get worn out after the first few candidates, thus giving others perfunctory, incomplete interviews.
Interviewers could also hastily choose from the first few candidates and rush through others in a bid to meet up with time. In such scenarios, there’s little chance that all the candidates receive proper assessments of their leadership abilities. Meanwhile, structured tests are quicker, easier, and much more effective.
4. Poor representation of job requirements
In contrast to skills assessments or job simulations, interviews give an unsatisfactory representation of the leadership skills required for the job role. Leadership assessment tests use detailed, descriptive, real-life situations that may arise on the job.
These give an idea of how skilled the candidate is for the leadership role. However, interviews focus more on the candidate’s verbal responses, confidence level, and charisma, which don’t always translate into knowledgeability.
5. Stress and pressure
Even the most casual interviews often have an air of tension that can affect the candidate and, sometimes, the interviewer too. Although good leaders should be able to work under pressure, the stifling environment of most interviews could overshadow a candidate’s impressive qualities.
While under pressure to impress the interviewer, some candidates may not be able to express how they would manage or relate to people. This can prevent the interviewer from getting a truly accurate picture of the candidate’s leadership abilities.
Using Vervoe to identify real leadership skills better
It’s impressive what amazing benefits leadership skills assessments have to offer. Now, let’s talk about how you can tap into these benefits with one of the best platforms for administering skills assessments – Vervoe.
Vervoe is a software solution that helps businesses manage recruitment and hiring challenges and easily identify top candidates. With this platform, you can administer structured, objective tests to get the most reliable results and hire the best for your business.
Vervoe’s features, like skills assessments and job simulation solutions, are excellent for eliminating bias and improving the accuracy of your hiring decisions. With 300+ templates for various roles, including management, our assessment library is ideal for anyone looking for quality skills assessments. Each template comes with questions in video, audio, and text format to give you a well-rounded idea of your candidate.
Moreover, Vervoe gives you the freedom to create custom questions, tailoring them to your unique job role. You can also choose from a vast pool of over 300,000 pre-existing questions. Additionally, you can train our AI optimization tool to decipher what responses you’d prefer for each question, thus improving your hiring efficiency.
But that’s not all. Our collaboration features let you share concise result breakdowns and communicate with candidates directly on the platform. To top it off, you can personalize your leadership assessment tests with your logos, brand colors, and even introductory videos. This enhances your candidates’ experience and ensures a more interactive assessment process.
Hire exceptional leaders with Vervoe’s leadership skills assessments
Good leadership is essential for any organization to run smoothly, but traditional interviews can be a pain. Luckily, leadership skills assessments make choosing and hiring competent leaders a more straightforward, speedy process.
Vervoe’s skills assessments are easy to integrate into your system while still giving you reliable, accurate results. With AI optimization, a massive template library, job simulations, collaboration tools, and even branding options, Vervoe is a must-have for identifying leaders and seamless hiring.
Get started with a free trial and enjoy the power of Vervoe’s leadership skills assessments today.
