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.
It could be that your organisation indicated that a fixed set of lenses should be used, by adjusting the names and descriptions to fit with organisational standards and have hid most or all other lenses. In this case, follow your company guidelines. If however you are recruiting for a new or previously unused position, you have to select a lens from the Assessio Lens Library.
Preparation
Before you select a lens, you should know the main characteristics of the job you will be recruiting for. That is, you need to know what the most important behaviors are, for someone to be successful in the job. The Assessio Performance Framework covers a total of 24 different behavioral competencies and each lens covers a set of 4 to 7 competencies. This means that you will have to be strict in deciding what is really important. Go over the job description and talk to people involved with the job to isolate key tasks and behaviors that determine job success. Typically, we find that quite a lot of things would be nice to have, but this step concerns trying to find what behavioral competencies we need to have in the role.
Next you need to determine whether the job is a management position, or a specialist position. This is because Leadership lenses only include leadership competencies and the other lenses, for specialist functions, include peopleship competencies. If the job you are recruiting is a leadership position, then you should always select a leadership lens.
Searching a lens
When you have completed this preparation; knowing the job behaviors that are most important and knowing whether the job is a management position, you can move on to using the search function. This is done in the second step of creating a recruitment, or if you have the recruiter admin role, by going to the Lens library.
You can search for specific job titles or functions in the search bar; this will show you lenses that have these job titles listed, or parts of it. By clicking on ‘Details’ you will see all related job titles for a lens. The lens title itself doesn't have to be an exact match to the title of the job you are recruiting for, but be sure to read the “just right part” of the competency descriptions and compare these to the behavior descriptions you completed in your preparation.
You can narrow down your search by selecting one or more Departments to use as a filter. 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.
You can also filter by three management levels: Higher management, first line management and specialist. Use the information you gathered in your preparation to make a decision; remember that the Higher management and management filter will only produce leadership lenses, with leadership competencies. By combining a level filter with a department filter, you should be able to find the right type of lens for your job.
Choosing a lens
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 the most important part of a lens are the competencies and the related behaviors.
When you searched and found a lens, you should check this lens for the following: do the competencies included in the lens, match the most important job behaviors? And if so, are the lens weights in the right order according to what you´re looking for? You can see these behaviors and the weights in lens details. If the competencies match and the weights are approximately correct, you can go ahead and use that lens for your recruitment. A high Match score, using this lens, will indicate that a candidate is very likely to perform well on the job.
Alternatives
If you followed this process but cannot find the right lens to use, there are three possible alternatives:
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First you should try to widen your search by including other departments in your filters.
Sometimes a job for a bank isn’t listed as part of ‘Finance’, but as part of ‘Sales’ or ‘Human resource’ depending on the specific tasks involved. And sometimes the right lens can only be found by searching the Behavioral profile lenses.
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The Second option is to create Organisational specific lenses, an option available to Recruitment Admins in the organisation.
These lenses will show up under an additional Department called Organizational Profiles or via checking the “show only organizational lenses” box. Use this second option if you have found a lens with suitable competencies but want to change the name and description of the lens and/or the relative competency weights by boosting a competency area over another.
Boosting can be found in the Lens Maker and is part of Customizing an existing lens. In this process you may change the lens title and lens description, to make it fit better to the job you are recruiting for or to the language used in your organization. By boosting you increase the weights of competencies, based on the Performance area they are in.
Alternatively, you can use the functionality of “mirroring a high performing employee, if you have a person that happens to be naturally very good at the job you are recruiting for. Note that Mirroring a high performing employee is only possible if your organization has the Development module active in the Assessio platform. You will take the data of an employee and use it to create two lenses: one leadership lens and a specialist lens. These lenses will include 4 to 6 competencies based on what the employee has the highest potential for. The lens can still be boosted to change the competency weights..
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The third and final alternative is to use the ‘General performance’ lens.
This can be used if the previous recommendations do not provide a good enough lens for the job you are recruiting for. Use this when you are very clear on what specific behavioral competencies are of importance to the job, but cannot find these exact behaviors represented by any lens.
In this case, choose the lens ‘General performance’ from the Behavioral profiles. This lens does not include specific competencies, but will provide an overall match towards all four performance areas. This means that, while indicating the candidates’ general potential in these areas, it does not provide a match towards any specific job. Selecting the ‘General performance lens’ will allow you to create your recruitment and start inviting candidates. You will however need to create a list of competencies yourself, based on your preparations, and use this when evaluating the candidates for this recruitment. In the Analyze Candidate(s) page, select the right competencies and compare candidates based on these competency scores.
The scores for the performance areas, Driving, Operative, Enabling, and Strategic, represent the candidates’ ability to perform well in general in these areas. The Match score then, is based on the assumption that each of these areas are equally important, which is not the case for most jobs. This is why you should use your selected competencies to make sure your candidates score well on the most important competencies in the job you are recruiting for..
In order for the Match score to really represent a person-job fit, one rule is most important for lens selection: the competencies that are included should match the job behavior you are recruiting for. But remember that selecting a lens does not change the assessments; always the same data is collected. So if you really can’t find the exact set of required competencies in a lens, you can add these later, during the analysing of results. This way you will find the best candidates for the job.