Assessment Techniques

Introduction

This article explores different assessment techniques available and how they are categorized. In GRI’s research, these techniques are analyzed regarding their use and impact on performance, as shown in the diagram on the right. The focus here is on listing the techniques, comparing some key features, and examining the benefits of using them together.

Generalities

Assessment techniques are tools and methods used to understand people broadly, including ourselves, others, and our organizations, through various concepts and for different applications. Since the rise of statistics in the late 19th century, computers in the 1980s, the Internet in the 1990s, and more recently AI, the potential of assessment techniques has significantly advanced. Over this time, the users of most sophisticated techniques have also changed—from psychiatrists and clinical psychologists early on, to recruiters and consultants, and more recently, coaches.

Assessment techniques have become more accessible and widely used; their nature has dramatically evolved, along with their application and the potential impact they can have on individual and group performance.

A variety of uses

In companies, assessment techniques are used for various purposes, including recruitment, management, leadership, and organizational development. Similar techniques are applied in clinical settings for psychotherapy, family therapy, marital counseling, and in everyday contexts such as matchmaking, conflict resolution, career counseling, parenting, and education.

While exploring new methods, we also kept those that naturally compete with them—our own private techniques—which share many similar characteristics. At GRI, we have observed a rise in published techniques since the early 2000s, when we began our analysis, along with increased use in life coaching and business coaching. We developed and published our assessment technique, known as the adaptive profile, which has been utilized at strategic levels within organizations. This gave us a benchmark to analyze other assessment techniques across different situations.

Classification of the techniques

Assessment techniques can be classified based on various criteria. These include what they evaluate, such as personality, intelligence, aptitude, behaviors, competencies, leadership, and creativity. They can also be distinguished by how they evaluate—using intuition, internet-based methods, or the way results are presented, such as verbally, in reports, or graphs. Additionally, factors like how techniques are learned or their different applications play a role. The information gathered by these techniques contributes to shaping judgments, improving decision quality, and enhancing self-awareness, social awareness, communication, learning, and accountability regarding one’s unique thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.

Starting with an initial analysis of 68 assessments focused on personality, the number grew to 150 by 2025, with new methods like parallel techniques being introduced. When viewed from various perspectives, including their impact on performance, assessment techniques have been categorized as follows:

Assessment Techniques

Group	Technique	Definition	Code 6a
Parallel Technique	Private technique	Anyone makes inferences and constructs judgments without any formal process or detailed statistics. These techniques can be private or shared.	T-PRIV
	Common sense		T-COMS
	Esotheric technique		T-ESOT
Semi-formal Technique	Non-directive interview	Organizations often use semi-formal techniques. They don't require a specific process or statistics, although they might benefit from both when the amount of results being gathered is large enough.	T-NDIN
	Semi-directive interview		T-SDIN
	Reference check		T-REFC
	On-the-job-trial		T-OTJT
	Resume		T-RESU
	Biodata		T-BIOD
Formal Technique	Directive interview	These techniques are formally implemented in organizations, often involving a job analysis, a thorough process, and trained assessors.They may also use statistics to validate the results . Assessment centers combine other techniques, including those from the other three groups.	T-DINT
	Structured interview		T-SINT
	Work-sample test		T-WORT
	Job simulation		T-JOBS
	In-basket exercise		T-IBSK
	Assessment Center		T-ASSC
Statistics-based Technique	360-degree assessment	These techniques rely on statistics to analyze and verify the results. They focus on specific individual characteristics and are often combined with other assessment techniques.	T-360D
	Personality assessment		T-PERS
	Intelligence assessment		T-INTL
	Skills assessment		T-SKIL
	Technical test		T-TEST
	Social Media Scan		T-SOCS

Comparisons Challenges

One challenge in analyzing assessment techniques is the availability of information from their users or publishers: the data is scattered, some is confidential, and obtaining all of it is difficult. The final information for each technique is always incomplete.

Another challenge is information volatility: assessments evolve, some have multiple versions; assessment techniques are introduced and discontinued regularly. Their users may change jobs or companies.

A third challenge is that the information is not always comparable across different techniques. Some characteristics that are relevant for certain techniques have little or no relevance for others, such as the number of dimensions being measured.

Our research focused on the utilization of assessment techniques (the independent variable), which involved recording, analyzing, and categorizing their use and effects on individual and organizational performance. The methodology from advanced social research allowed us to compare these assessments based on their use.

Clinical tests play a significant role in the personality testing literature. Psychiatry and clinical psychology laid the groundwork for the development of the earliest assessments since the late 19th century. Although clinical tests have limited practical application in other areas, research in this field provides an initial understanding of assessment techniques, especially in relation to questionnaires and standards for their validity. The concept of personality is often understood broadly, encompassing traits that make an individual unique. At other times, its definition is narrower, focusing on a few traits. Both definitions were used during our work.

Assessment Techniques Characteristics

Looking at assessment techniques, we could identify 29 characteristics that can be found across them, account for the quality of their measures, and their potential use and impact on individual and organizational performance. The characteristics were regrouped into four categories:

• Upfront characteristics, such as the nature and number of items being measured or the assessment time.
• Intrinsic qualities, such as the number of facets being measured, the stability or intensity of the measures, and work-relatedness.
• Assessment results, such as how the results are presented, conciseness, and general validity of the measures.
• Theory and Manual, such as the a priori theory of the technique, its age, and publications.

The distribution model of the technique could have been added to the above list, which affects the way the techniques are deployed in companies, marketed, sold, and serviced. Some techniques are in the public domain and free, others are paid for per unit, and still others are not sold but are integrated into coaching and consulting programs. The prices of the techniques vary widely. Results’ analyses are sometimes subcontracted by the consulting company that distributes the technique, or the analyses may be handled by the client organization. The role of the consultant or individual who deploys the technique in the organization must also be taken into account for how the assessment technique is used. The competencies and ease of the consultant in providing feedback and deploying the techniques also have an impact on their benefits. But these aspects can be considered independently of the assessment, or who its users are. That’s the approach we adopted in the research model used for analyzing the assessment techniques.

It is not possible to be completely exhaustive in a list of criteria for qualifying assessment techniques. The characteristics listed, however, represent a relatively large sample. They relate to aspects other than metrics and those of their use. They help to account for the variety of assessment techniques with respect to their possible uses and impact on individual and organizational performance.

Private Techniques

In all situations where everyone assesses and is assessed, the most widely and commonly used technique is the one we have called "private techniques." It is the one each of us uses to select what we believe are the most essential and relevant characteristics in situations like performing in a job, building trust in people, and making use of the information being assessed in our interaction with them. These "private techniques are naturally used to construct judgments about people and also in organizational situations. Unlike other techniques, parallel techniques are generally not expressed, even if they are naturally used by everyone. They are the ones that are the most subjective and the least controlled.

Semi-Formal Techniques

Semi-formal techniques are the second most commonly used techniques in organizations. The metric quality of these techniques is dependent on the interests, preferences, and skills of their users. For instance, non-directive and semi-directive interviews are generally inconsistent and of low quality.

It is through the different forms of semi-formal techniques that most judgments continue to naturally form with all potential biases. As for the parallel techniques, perception errors are not controlled. The other technique most commonly used in conjunction with the interview is that of the online resume, which is a concentrated collection of information about a person. These techniques, added to those of the first group, form the pillars of organizational evaluation techniques because of their natural and accepted access in work environments. Reference check makes it possible to validate and test the first judgments while collecting additional information. It chronologically happens before a more formal assessment technique.

Formal Techniques

These techniques are formally implemented in organizations, requiring a job analysis, and a rigorous process with trained assessors. They may use statistics to get additional insights to validate the results, but they may not be used upfront to calculate teh results. Results are obtained by observations and thus for this reason as said to be subjective. These techniques make it possible to further refine one's judgments on people based on additional expertise, whether it be for recruitment or in any other situation, after recruitment. Those Techniques do not require up-front sophisticated statistics to produce their results, but only a formalized setting that usually takes time to prepare and deploy. Assessment centers are a particular case that aggregates other techniques of the other three categories, in a formal way, though that follows the formal standards of this category.

Statistics-based Techniques

The techniques in this group use statistics to produce their results. Techniques such as surveys, questionnaires, 360-degree assessments, and tests fall into this category. Differently than formal techniques, the assessment time may be short, and the process easy and standardized. Most often individuals follow a process that is rigorous and automated, and may happen remotely. The statistic-based techniques are naturally complemented by other techniques of the three other categories. The concept assessed by those techniques may be intelligence, personality, or any type of skills.

Techniques’ Practical Usage

The usage of assessment techniques is tightly connected not only to the techniques themselves as a tool with their technical qualities, but also to their users. Some techniques are meant to be in the hands of professionals who will administer and interpret the results. Professionalism must be understood at different levels, depending on how long it takes to be certified to administer some of the techniques and how close you are to clinical cases that require extra professional attention.

Ultimately, everyone uses their assessment techniques, either formally, informally, privately, or not, using statistics to objectify the assessment process and collect more information. How those techniques are used not only depends on the above criteria but what you can expect from them to improve individual and organizational performance, whatever criteria are used to define efficiency and performance.

Combining Techniques

The natural, easy access of assessment techniques is the first criterion of their use in the construction of one's judgment and in various applications. Our private technique is king. This technique is part of ourselves, develops very early in everyone, and is permanent whether at home or at work. The fact of having been used first and for a significant period of time before even a work experience, gives it an emotional and rational anchor for everyone. It gives this technique a form of primacy of use over other techniques.

When considering the more complex and tool-assisted assessment, 360 degree or test techniques, it should be noted that each one does not address the same needs and do not allow the same uses. While the assessment, structured interview and test techniques are used in recruitment, the 360-degree one only concerns people already in the job with a personal development objective.

Simple assessments may have broader applications in language, organization, or management that are not found in assessments of traits used in recruitment and 360-degree techniques. In the figure below, eight techniques are arranged in the order in which they naturally participate in the construction of judgment, before and after entering an organization.

Each technique makes it possible to obtain part of the information. For example, the 360-degree makes it possible to obtain peripheral information on the environment of a person (a manager most of the time) about his way of delegating, communicating, solving problems, etc., conversely, GRI’s adaptive profiles with the Role, obtain information about the environment through the survey participant. The information provided by each technique complements the other. None is enough to give information about a person. Some concepts that are accessible by the biodata or the interview will not be accessible by the personality survey or a work-sample test. An online resume and reference check will be more suitable for assessing technical competencies, the quality of certificates, diplomas or years of experience.

What is measured by each technique must be related to what will be done with it for the person themselves, the people in their environment, and the organization. The objective of a 360 degree is used by the person himself in personal development. No use of the information is foreseen by the organizational environment. On the other hand, the information from an Assessment is also used by the environment: the manager, human resources. If the metric aspects are important to consider in order to distinguish between different techniques and what they measure in a recruitment or career counseling situation, each technique must also be compared by the uses made of it in recruitment, management, organizational development, learning, self, and social awareness, and communication.