September 2020 was a very exciting month for us here at Thomas International. Just over a year after we first started talking internally about launching a new talent assessment platform, we launched the Thomas platform to clients in the UK.
Consisting of two applications – Thomas Perform and Thomas Profile, this offered a new way for clients to get value from the assessments that we’ve become so well known for over the last four decades.
Thomas Perform is the application used by our clients in HR, talent acquisition, recruitment and people management. It allows them to invite candidates and employees to take assessments, and then gives them instant access to immediately usable insight and content that have been written specifically to address business outcomes that we’ve found over the years to be most valued by our clients in recruitment and management scenarios.
Helping you to get a better understanding of your candidates and employees, the content can be understood and applied straight away, without requiring training or accreditation. Thomas Perform gives easy to understand guidance on how to onboard individuals, how to manage them, how to motivate them and more, addressing communication style, strengths, and areas for development.
It also makes it a piece of cake to create an effective psychological profile for an ideal candidate for a role (based on robust, validated science) in only a few simple steps, so that you can compare candidates’ assessment results against the profile using simple star ratings, and quickly identify the strongest applicant.
Assessment-takers log into the Thomas Profile application to take our assessments. Once they’ve completed their assessments, not only do you get to view their results straight away in Thomas Perform, but they are presented with a summary of their results. This gives them valuable self-awareness, helping them to better understand themselves and grow. It also gives your company a great reputation amongst applicants as one that doesn’t just leave them hanging after an application, but gives them some quality feedback without requiring your talent acquisition team to lift a finger.
Based on just our Behaviour assessment at the time of launch, the Thomas platform has been quietly evolving behind the scenes, adding more features and functionality to add further value to our clients, helping them to make more objective and informed people decisions. The next big change to the platform will be the introduction of our Aptitude assessment in Q1 2021.
Why assessments, and why Aptitude?
Research conducted by Schmidt and Hunter in 1998 revealed that psychological factors have the strongest relationships with overall success at work. While experience and qualifications obviously can’t be discounted, understanding a person’s personality and behaviour, as well as their general intelligence, or aptitude, gives you a much better understanding of their potential for success in role.
As a result of not just redundancies brought on by the pandemic, but also the enforced remote working that came with it, many companies have a much broader candidate pool to choose from when recruiting. Selecting the right candidate from an ocean of many, where a large number may share similar qualifications and experience can be nigh on impossible. Judging only on CV and interview makes it easy for bias to creep into decision making – both conscious and unconscious. Maybe the candidate you hired went to the same university as you or said they liked the same band you do. Maybe the one you didn’t select was actually much better suited to the role and your company culture, but you let them slip through your fingers as they didn’t go to university at all.
Assessments give you a much deeper insight into an individual than just a glance at a CV or a LinkedIn profile can. Traits measured by the Thomas Behaviour assessment can be a great way to see if a candidate will fit your business as well as having the right qualifications. When you add the results of the Aptitude assessment, you get much more visibility into their potential for success in the role as well.
Thomas’ Aptitude assessment; is an accurate way of predicting a candidate’s potential contribution to an organisation. It measures their fluid intelligence, i.e., how quickly they will learn and retain new skills and procedures and how quickly they can grasp a new role. The assessment was developed over 15 years by Dr Peter Dann in the Human Assessment Laboratory at the University of Plymouth.
It looks at an individual's speed of processing information and ability to learn and develop new skills and is used for a variety of purposes: recruitment, retention, development, management, identifying training needs, career guidance, succession planning and benchmarking.
Aptitude tests can provide the answers to questions such as:
- Can this person think on their feet?
- Can they cope with the mental demands of a role?
- How able are they to thrive in a high-change or dynamic environment?
- Could this person be a high-flyer?
- Is this person a problem solver?
To find out more, click this link to our Aptitude tests page.
