What Assessments can help us find young leaders from premier MBA Schools?

Dear Sajith,

“What Assessments can help us find young leaders from premier MBA Schools?”, is perhaps the most common discussion in an organization when it comes to hiring from Campus. We try one assessment one year, don’t get to know if it works or not, don’t know if it had any correlation to performance, and then we move to another one! It almost becomes a Eeny, meeny, miny, moe... decision.

Hiring on campus may seem like buying a Smartphone. Many phones in the market make the cut of being ‘smart’ :) But, you still apply parameters like user experience, look and feel, hardware configuration, battery life to find the phone that works for you.

Similarly, the fact that these MBA students have cleared the CATs and XATs of the world (& probably several other aptitude tests) indicates that ‘Academic Intelligence’ exists. But then, how do you judge if ‘Business Intelligence’ exists? The Talent leaders at Pearson TalentLens, our partner, and my team at Jombay came up with a model, Young Leaders Assessment, that measures Brains as well as Behavior. The model measures 4 competencies:

• Critical Thinking (Recognize Assumptions, Evaluate Arguments, Draw Conclusions)
• Result Focus (Target Orientation, Planning & Prioritization, Decisiveness, Ownership)
• Task Focus (Persistence, Stress Tolerance, Foresight, Initiative, Compliance)
• People Focus (People Understanding, Convincing, Assertiveness, Networking)

This Young Leader Assessment includes a module on Watson Glaser Critical Thinking & another one on Jombay Personality & Emotional Intelligence. We have used it for identifying high potential across different levels. This Brain-Behavior offering has been a strong (and a reliable) indicator of potential. The studies on such models indicate:

• The Criterion validity based on ‘performance ratings’ on 2 distinctive criteria is over 0.5 consistently for both criteria.
• The Criterion validity based on ‘manager feedback’ has been 0.48 when correlated with on job performance dealing with professional knowledge and expertise
• The probability of candidates clearing the interview is 1.5 times higher if the candidate also cleared the Assessment; overall potential shows significant correlation with the assessment scores yielding the predictive validity coefficient as 0.32

Here’s how the report snapshot looks like - I am personally quite bullish on the results we have seen so far. You can see the full report here - Young Leaders Assessment. I will keep you posted on our research here. Your experiences welcome!

Warm regards,

Mohit

P.S. We also have a separate Assessment model for hiring from Tier 3 & 4 Business schools. This is a strip down model largely used for front-line sales hiring.
P.P.S. If you have missed Jombay’s article on Millennials published in Economic Times on Wednesday, have a look here -  Millennials don’t like to compromise on work quality - Jombay

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Mohit Gundecha | Co-founder & CEO

JOMBAY | Behavior to Bottomline

 

Psychometrics | HiPo Identification | Frontline Assessments