AUGUST 2022HR TECH OUTLOOK8In My OpinionUSING DATA-RICH ASSESSMENTS TO DELIVER OBJECTIVE HIRING AND PERFORMANCE DECISIONSErin Bartman, Head of Strategy, Customer Success Workforce Transformation & Readiness, SAPByErin Bartman has nearly 20 years' experience working to elevate teams, organizations and work environments. Beginning with a career in Human Resources and Consulting, she led organizational build-outs and focused on the optimization of people and processes across North America, Latin America, Europe and Asia Pacific. For the past 8 years, Erin's priority has been the diversification of SAP's customer organization and building programmatic approaches to foster a more inclusive, high performing work environment. These efforts have led to a reduced average age and greater share of females across the organization. Erin has been fortunate to connect her passion for fairness and equity with her skill for building and implementing integrated workforce strategies to create a more meaningful work experience for employees. Personal biases present a real challenge to hiring and promotion decisions. Whether you are a recruiter or an executive responsible for building a diverse, high performing organization, most of us can recall poor hires we made based on our lack of objectivity. So how--in a world saturated with streams of information and data--do we continue to make decisions without the necessary information and data required for clear objectivity?The truth is data is leveraged daily for business-related decisions. Yet, with people and talent, we often take mental shortcuts based on our preference to hire someone like us, our need to make a fast decision, our perception that past performance will lead to success in the new role, etc. There is a scientific reason for this as biases have served humans throughout history when our livelihood depended on our ability to make quick judgements. Today, these quick decisions can have unintended consequences. In the case of hiring, it can interfere with our ability to objectively identify the best talent, resulting in less dynamic, more homogenous teams. And, if not challenged, can influence nothing less than the culture of the company. Self-assessments can serve to break up this "homogeneity cycle," supporting us with objective data points that help to cut through the "why not's" we tend to have about less traditional candidates. Self-assessments are a highly practical, and often affordable, way to introduce data-driven decision-making into hiring and promotion processes. Research has shown that, after implementing assessments, 76 percent of corporations have seen an increase in the quality of hire. Commonly, assessments used Erin Bartman
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