Behavioural assessments: the benefits of seeing behaviour in action

Behavioural assessments: the benefits of seeing behaviour in action

In any recruitment process, the ultimate aim is to identify both how well a candidate is likely to do a job (or who is likely to do it best), as well as how they are likely to approach doing the job.

Can they do it and do it well? How are they likely to approach problem solving and how effective are they? How well do they communicate with different people? How well do they work with others? How do they respond when things don’t go according to plan?

To answer these questions, recruiters and organisations usually lean on common recruitment tools such as resumés, written applications, interviews, and sometimes psychometric assessments. While these approaches are a good start, they are limited by the fact that you are relying on a candidate to tell you about their performance… and candidates are (understandably) motivated to sell themselves in a recruitment process.

Today, with an increasing number of candidates using AI tools to assist them in selection processes, from curated written applications that all sound the same to preparing well-polished interview responses and examples, to (in some cases) using AI agents to assist them in taking psychometric assessments, it is becoming increasingly challenging to trust the information we get from some of these methods.

So how do we combat this and go from relying on candidates telling us how amazing they are (with the help of AI) to understanding their actual ability to do the job?

Behavioural activities and assessments can be a useful way to supplement other pieces of information in recruitment processes and provide real, observable information about candidate performance. They often take the form of group/team activities, simulations, or role plays, allowing assessors to actually observe candidates in action and see how they perform, rather than relying on them telling you about how they work.

These activities are designed to draw out the behaviours you need to see in order to assess key competencies for the role. For example:

• If you want to assess someone’s teamwork, you put them in a situation where they have to collaborate with others to achieve a goal.
• To assess someone’s problem solving, you can present them with a problem that they have to think critically about to solve.
• If you want to assess someone’s adaptability and how they cope with challenges or setbacks, activities can include unexpected curveballs or changes to the activity that would elicit either positive or negative behavioural responses.
• If you want to see how candidates approach safety and compliance, you can build rules into the activity and see how they follow these and enforce them with others.

An added benefit of behavioural activities is that they can be designed or tailored to reflect the specific job, industry, or organisation, giving candidates a realistic job preview and better insights into what to expect and whether this is the right role for them.

Perhaps the future of recruitment isn’t about finding new ways to ask candidates how they would perform. It’s about creating opportunities to see it for yourself. When behaviour is observable, hiring decisions become clearer, fairer, and ultimately, more successful.

Get in touch with our team today to find out more about how you could incorporate behavioural assessments into your recruitment processes.