Product Insight: How SquarePeg Is Reshaping the Workplace Assessment
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Over the past several months, we’ve been receiving a lot of inquiries regarding our proprietary assessment and how it works – and for good reason. There are a lot of assessments out there that help recruitment teams glean insight into a candidate’s behavioral patterns and personalities. But not all assessments are created equal and some have even been debunked for their inaccurate results and methodologies.
But according to Vivian Liu, an Industrial Organizational (I/O) Psychology Specialist at SquarePeg, there’s a lot to be confident about when it comes to the assessment.
Currently leading assessment research and development under SquarePeg's Chief Science Officer, Dr. Scott Highouse, Vivian was intrigued by what she saw in the platform.
“The product is very innovative and no other recruitment companies that I am aware of have a product that uses both validated constructs in I/O psychology and AI technology to match job applicants with potential employers.”
SquarePeg’s Assessment
In a nutshell, the proprietary assessment counts 19 individual workplace traits – ie, reliability, adaptability, proactiveness and confidence – that are organized into 4 main categories and weaved into an applicant’s holistic profile on SquarePeg's platform.
Although seemingly simplistic, the final framework is a product of all the relevant literature in previously existing research - ensuring that it’s not only accurate, but that it follows best practices and is comprehensive. The research and production process is lengthy, but a must, as the team wanted to ensure that “we are measuring what we claim to be measuring” and as a result, “we never put items on our platform without enough empirical evidence to support our results and conclusions.”
The SquarePeg Advantage
The assessment’s complexity and comprehensive nature makes it difficult to fake or hack according to Ms. Liu. This is because the assessment isn’t based on the more traditional Likert scale which “tends to inflate scale means and intercorrelations which can lead to reduced validity and utility for measures used for high-stakes decision making.”
In order to address these issues of potential errors, Vivian notes that “SquarePeg uses a format that vastly minimizes rater errors and response biases and has been shown to decrease applicant faking significantly when compared to published results on forced-choice format.”
SquarePeg’s assessment further diverges from other personality tests in the fact that it is comparably broader in scope and constructs clear factor structures. By applying these types of structures, SquarePeg’s assessment is able to focus on measuring for only one personality trait at a time. This is in stark contrast to other more widely publicized personality tests that don’t have a clear structure – creating a scenario where individual statements or questions are measuring for more than one trait and ultimately producing scoring that is far less precise.
According to Liu, “each statement in SquarePeg’s assessment focuses on measuring for only one personality trait at a time, which accurately evaluates a test taker’s standing when it comes to the target personality trait.”
And, what about when making comparisons to more popular neuroscience games?
“One of the advantages of using neuroscience games in hiring is that this method collects and measures actual behaviors of the applicants – like risk behavior, generally done with an inflating balloon game.” Unfortunately, this isn’t as predictive because “neuroscience games take out the working context when measuring applicant behavior. Although the balloon game predicts risk taking propensity in adolescents, whether it predicts adults’ on-the-job risk taking behaviors remains unclear.”
According to Ms. Liu, SquarePeg not only assesses “applicant’s personality traits, but also their values, preferred working style, environment and working culture. Therefore, we not only fit our applicants to a position, we fit our applicants to a job that’s embedded in an organization that fits their personality characteristics.”
As a result, notes Vivian, SquarePeg’s assessment measures more in less time compared to neuroscience games that tend to only measure a person’s standing on certain personality traits.
What’s In Store For the Future?
With a goal of creating a more comprehensive assessment to support higher accuracy and validity, the team has already begun to prepare the current test for the next iteration. By creating a format that covers more information in the same amount of time, the final assessment looks to become more robust in nature, collect deeper insights into candidate personalities and inform the product’s ever evolving AI engine.
“We developed over 200 constructs and over 1500 items to measure people’s standing on each personality construct.”
By tapping into a new psychometric design (via Item Response Theory), the team is looking to drastically reduce the testing time as well as “improving scoring accuracy but also economizing test administration by using discriminative items. This also helps in increasing the granularity of our assessment in revamping the employer assessment in order to improve the matching algorithm for both employers and candidates.”