EMPLOYMENT TEST 1 Recruitment and Selection HRMT 59120 Employment Test Assignment Submitted to: Professor John Hardisty Submitted by: Amrita Chatterjee Dey, Ravinder Kaur & Zodie Ann Donaldson EMPLOYMENT TEST 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS Employer Contact Particulars 3 Description of Employment Test 3 How is the Test Used by the Employer 4 Assessment Tools Used 5 Validity of the Test 5 Reliability of the Test 5 Recommendation 6 References 7 EMPLOYMENT TEST 3 Employer Contact Particulars The company we contacted is Apposite Learning Solutions. Apposite Learning Solutions was founded in 2012 by a group of ex-Microsoft Learning Professionals whose aim was to simplify learning and create engaging experiences for today’s learners. The company provides elearning training and development services via employee training programs, providing digital learning solutions, sales training programs, business consulting services, and learning consulting services. Apposite Learning Solutions seek to ensure employees have the perfect environment to upskill themselves through highly engaging and effective employee training programs (Apposite, n.d.). Description of Employment Test At Apposite Learning Solutions, potential entry-level candidates are given four employment tests at different stages for the Instructional Designer position. These include essay writing, aptitude test, psychometry, and logical reasoning tests. The first test given to the candidates is the essay writing test. This is used as a “knockout” test and candidates who do not qualify in this test will not successfully move forward to the next test. Essay Writing is very crucial for the Instructional Designer position as potential employees must have language skills to be able to create storyboards based on the content outlines and to develop assessment items to test defined learning objectives. It is also important that candidates can communicate clearly and concisely with internal team members and clients. For essay writing potential candidates are given two topics, they are required to select one topic and write an essay discussing the chosen topic. The essay must outline an introduction, a body, and a conclusion in the correct order with a maximum of a thousand words. Essay topics are normally related to the job they will need to perform and trending topics thus the candidates would have prior knowledge and information. The internet should not be used to assist in essay writing, copy and paste are allowed. An assessment tool is used to review candidates' essaywriting skills. The essay writing test is utilised by Apposite Learning Solutions to identify and evaluate the candidate’s written communication skills and abilities. It is used to predict the applicant’s ability to successfully perform the job. Employees must have excellent written and verbal communication skills, language comprehension and organisation skills to perform their tasks EMPLOYMENT TEST 4 on this e-learning platform. Therefore, providing applicants with a test that displays the applicant's ability to write and communicate effectively can assist the company in measuring the level of skill the candidate is bringing prior to entering the job as well as their potential. How The Test Is Used by Employer This test is used by Apposite Learning Solutions to eliminate candidates from the selection process, this is referred to as a “knockout test”. They use this pre-employment test for entrylevel positions such as Instructional Designer and are given to the fresh graduates at a campus hiring or walk-in candidates. The reason to conduct the above various types of tests for this role is that an Instructional Designer must be able to perform their job effectively and efficiently. Based on the essay writing test, employers assess the candidates on various parameters required for the job. Ideal candidates should have language skills. Apposite Learning Solutions believe that if a candidate has no language skills, then all other tests won't help them to determine their capabilities. Employers have certain restrictions for essay writing tests: the candidate should not use google and should not copy the content from other sources. It must be developed and written by themselves. The employer can trace candidates cheating on the test. The format for essay writing they are looking for is the introduction of the topic, the middle part or the body, and a conclusion. There should be flow and interconnection in the information written by the candidate. Employer uses recent trends topics for the test. Managers use different tools to assess a candidate’s performance. There are no standardised answers that they are looking for as its content based. But the score is affected by the grammar, clarity of thoughts, and limitation of words. Time limit and word count are also major factors affecting a candidate’s score. The employer has been using this test for about 7 years. This test has been very helpful for the employer in knocking down a good ratio of candidates. As the employer describes, when the test is used against walk-in candidates, the test can eliminate approximately 60 candidates out of 80 walk-in candidates, thus having a high knock out ratio. Assessment Tools Used The essays written by the candidates is assessed against various assessment tools which check for plagiarism, grammar, vocabulary, sentence construction and organisation of ideas. Various tools used by the employer includes Scribbr (in partnership with Turnitin) and Grammarly to EMPLOYMENT TEST 5 check for plagiarism, grammar, and sentence construction. This is followed by manually grading the essays online using a rubric grading system. Validity of the Test Validity is an important criterion while selecting a test to be used for employment test. Validity refers to what characteristic the test measures and how well the test measures that characteristic. (hrguide.com, 2022) The essay test used by the employer is valid because the characteristic that is being measured is related to job qualifications and requirements. The test is giving meaning to the test scores. It is also showing the linkage between test performance and job performance. It is helpful in concluding or predicting about the candidate from their score on the test. It is demonstrating to be a valid predictor of performance on the specific job. “The employer can conclude that candidates scoring high on the test are more likely to perform well on the job than persons who score low on the test, all else being equal”. (hrguide.com) It indicates the usefulness of the test. Reliability of Test Reliability refers to how dependably or consistently a test measures a skill or ability that is required for a job position. This means if a person takes the test again then will he or she get consistently similar test score. Based on examination it can be determined that the essay writing test used by Apposite Learning Solution is reliable. The test seeks to identify the applicant’s ability to write structured essays without grammatical errors. The test is also used to determine if the applicant can effectively communicate. Communication and writing skills are important characteristics that an Instructional Designer needs to have based on the job description for the position which includes writing storyboards and effective communication with clients. The aim of the test is not to examine the candidate's opinion but the candidate's ability to write grammatically correct sentences as well as the ability to fluently communicate through writing. Therefore, this eliminates the need for subjectivity or to have answers that will be compared with standardised answers. While this test is reliable there are factors that may result in measurement error. These include the test taker's temporary psychological or physical state. For example, anxiety, fatigue, or motivation may affect the applicant's test results. Environmental factors such as room temperature, lighting, noise, or even the test administrator may influence the candidate’s performance. EMPLOYMENT TEST 6 Recommendations A good employment test should have both high reliability and high validity which is being used for the selection process. A reliable measure must be replicable and must give consistently the same results when tested under equivalent conditions. (English, 1988). The essay writing test is a written communication skill test, and it assesses the language comprehension skills and written communication skills required for the Instructional Designer position and hence helps in obtaining written samples from the candidate. So, this test is a good predictor of future behaviour. This test has high reliability and high content validity and high construct validity. Since the results of the essay writing are first assessed through the plagiarism detecting tools like Grammarly or Scribrr, this ensures the consistency of the result obtained. Moreover, the parameters and instructions for the test being used are consistent for all the tests conducted for all the applicants and the same grading rubrics is used for grading all the essays: these two factors add to the reliability of the results and grades obtained. This test has high content validity as the essay writing is a work sample and closely resembles the actual work to be performed on the job. Since the test measures and scores the written communication skill needed for the job, it is difficult for the applicants to fake job proficiency which helps to increase the relationship between the scores on the test and performance on the job. (hrguide.com, 2022) The validity coefficient of this test further increases as it is being used in combination with the other three employment tests for the selection process. This work sample test has proved to be successful in eliminating applicants when many candidates apply for the job position of Instructional Designer. As per the employer, candidates who have scored high in this test have been seen to have high performance on the job. The candidates hired are also extremely successful at performing job duties and tasks of creating the content and language development of learning modules. As a result, it is recommended that the employer keep using the essay writing test as a knockout test and use it in combination with the aptitude test psychometric and logical reasoning test to select applicants. However, there is an opportunity for increasing the reliability score for this test because of the measurement errors mentioned before. For this reason, it is recommended to use the test and retest method for increasing the reliability or use internal consistency method. The first method requires the company to conduct the test twice. This is because testing and retesting the same employment test increases the reliability of the test. However, this could be time consuming and expensive. Therefore, the other option is to measure reliability is the internal consistency EMPLOYMENT TEST 7 method. In this method, instead of doing two different tests the employer can redesign the essay writing test to have two sections of questions, and consequently, language skills, written communication skills and content are evaluated. The correlations between the scores of the two sets of questions will be calculated and then averaged. This average estimates the internal consistency which can be used to estimate reliability. Modifying the essay writing test with two sections will result in higher reliability. Based on these two measures, the employer can decide on how to improve the essay writing test and keep using it as a knockout test in combination with the other three tests for selection of applicants. EMPLOYMENT TEST 8 References Chapter 3: Understanding test quality-concepts of reliability and validity. Testing and Assessment - Reliability and Validity. (n.d.). Retrieved November 24, 2022, from https://hr-guide.com/Testing_and_Assessment/Reliability_and_Validity.htm Instructional designer. Apposite. (n.d.). Retrieved November 23, 2022, from https://www.appositelearning.com/content/instructional-designer/ Our story. Apposite. (n.d.). Retrieved November https://www.appositelearning.com/content/our-story/ 23, 2022, from
