In the Lens Library you can find over 50 different lenses that can be used during recruitment. A lens is a way of looking at assessment outcomes and determining what is ‘good’. By selecting a lens you complete an important step in the recruitment process: you define the job for which you are recruiting. This job is made up of behaviors that are important for it’s success. A lens describes these behaviors in terms of competencies.
There are three parts to a lens: the lens name and description, the lens type, and the lens behavior. The lens name displays the work area, role or responsibility that best describes the behavior covered by the lens. The lens name is therefore not a job title, since two different jobs with different titles, may actually require the same kind of work behavior. Below the name is a short description of the kind of person that would score high on this lens.
But don’t just select a lens based on a name. Look at the lens type as well, which is displayed as a department and a level. You can choose from six departments: five more traditional ones, such as finance or marketing and a more general one, called behavioral profiles. Behavioral profiles focus on specific behaviors that can be of importance across different departments, such as problem solving or networking. When looking for appropriate lenses you can make your search easier by selecting one or more departments to use as a filter.
The same can be done for the three levels: Higher management, first line management and specialist. These describe the experience level linked to the expected job behavior. By combining a level with a department, you should be able to find the right type of lens for your job.
Click on ‘View more’ to see a full description of the lens. This also includes the related job titles, which list some previously used job titles for the kind of work that the lens is about. And below that, a short summary of this work in behavioral terms.
Here you also see the lens behavior, which is the most important part of the lens. This is the behavior you are trying to predict using the Assessio assessments. Selecting a lens does not change these assessments, every candidate completes a personality measure and a measure for general mental ability. But by selecting a lens you determine what behaviors are required for the job and thus the relative importance of different personality traits and mental ability that increase the likelihood of these behaviors.
The lens behavior is shown as a list of competencies from the Assessio Performance framework. These are competencies such as ‘Initiating action’ and ‘Demonstrates integrity’ for the specialist type lenses, or leadership competencies, such as ‘Driving leadership’ or ‘Operative leadership’, for the management type lenses. Each competency or performance area has its relative importance, or weight, in the form of a percentage. And you can see in the circle above, that these weights add up to 100%.
Each competency covers a set of behaviors. And by clicking on the competency, you can see what it means to underdo, overdo or perform just right on these behaviors. After an assessment and based on the selected lens, you will see a match score for each candidate, represented in the same way: likely to overdo on the job behavior, likely to underdo, or expected to perform just right. Note that even after an assessment it is possible to look at a candidate through a different lens, since the assessments are always the same. And it is possible to look separately at specific competencies for each candidate as well, even ones not included in the originally selected lens.
But selecting the right lens is one of the most important steps in the recruitment process, as the calculation of the match score is based on it and candidates will be ranked on this match score. The match score should be thought of as a person-job fit. The match between the job, represented by the lens, and the person, represented by the potential scores from personality and general mental ability. If you select the right lens, you’ll be able to find the right people for the job.