Analytical Tools for HR Professionals

Assessment Products – Easily Tailored at a Low Cost

Shaker Consulting Group offers a library of assessment content with documented validity for predicting a range of mission critical employee behaviors. Assessment solutions for your most pivotal positions can be quickly tailored from our extensive library.

Virtual Job Tryout® and Other Assessments

Automated, online applicant assessments are our key offering. Additional information on assessments is listed here.

Interview Guides

Interviewing can be extremely valuable in the hiring process, when it complements the other data collected about applicants. Research has shown that highly structured, behaviorally-based interviews, targeting key criteria can be very accurate, and Shaker Consulting Group offers a suite of interviewing tools, including:

• Guidelines for effective interviewing
• Legal considerations
• Training on how to rate candidates effectively
• Rating forms
• Competency-based interview questions with behavioral anchors
• Complete Interview Guides customized around your competencies, including rating forms, instructions, and questions

Performance Management

Many ongoing performance appraisal processes do not capture or communicate the most important information about performance, and serve limited use in creating positive change. Shaker Consulting Group creates highly specific, easy to use anchored behavioral rating scales that allow your supervisors to give reliable ratings that provide true insight into individual strengths and developmental needs.

Development Guides

Shaker Consulting Group ties all developmental activities back to the competencies that are most critical for success, to ensure that your efforts are maximally efficient and effective. We offer a variety of competency-based developmental tools to enhance performance.

Executive Assessment

For high level, mission critical positions, it is important to learn as much as possible about your candidates. Shaker Consulting Group’s expert industrial psychologists can assess the strengths and developmental needs of your candidates through a proprietary interview and assessment process, culminating in a unique assessment report that documents all relevant applicant characteristics. This assessment can be augmented with a developmental action planning session, in which Shaker’s Ph.D. consultants work with your executives, one on one, to determine specific actions that will help to improve strengths and lessen limitations.

Card Sorts

Shaker Consulting Group’s card sort process is based on a unique competency framework, which is designed to include all potentially relevant business competencies. Using the card deck with our structured process, clients can perform specific sorts to analyze new hire characteristics, review employee performance, create competency and performance models, and more. Assessing performance is much easier with the card sort, because you are able to see the full spectrum of characteristics that lead to business results. This helps users to broaden their perspectives and focus not just on the specific set of competencies that they already do well.

Organization Surveys

Shaker Consulting Group employs a variety of organizational surveys to promote better understanding of issues affecting individual, team, and organizational performance. Specific surveys are available for analyzing culture, attitudes, organizational effectiveness, and for 360-degree (multi-rater) feedback. Customized surveys can also be easily developed, and the surveys can be deployed online or on paper.

Virtual Job Tryout® and Other Assessment Products

Shaker Consulting Group’s assessment philosophy is vastly different from other firms. In fact, traditional off-the-shelf tests do little to help organizations find the best people for their unique jobs. Often, irrelevant information from these tests actually decreases the accuracy of the hiring decision.

Further, applicants are turned off by intimidating test processes that provide little insight into the job or your organization. At Shaker, our assessments are designed to:

• Be less like tests and more like job tryouts. We strive to make our assessments as high fidelity and engaging as possible to increase applicant interest and provide them with a glimpse of what the job is really like.
• Offer two-way information exchange. That is, the applicant learns something about the job and organization, while you also learn about the applicant. This is much more respectful of the applicant than a typical test process, in which the discovery is very one-sided.
• Offer a realistic preview of job. Our assessments often feature a description of the opportunities and challenges of a job or organization. This is not a marketing piece designed to convince people to apply, but rather an honest look at the position and the issues that might cause a person to fail. Sharing this information ultimately helps poor-fit applicants to self select out of the process, saving you both time and money.
• Be easily tailored for your job/organization. Generic assessments are for generic companies. Research has shown repeatedly that customized assessments, targeted to your unique objectives, are much more valid predictors of new hire success. This results in saving you money and adding value to your enterprise. In fact, returns from our assessments are often in the millions of dollars for the first year alone, many times the cost of the systems themselves.
• Easily integrated into your technology platform. Shaker Consulting Group’s assessments are designed to mesh seamlessly with your existing technology platforms. They can be built into your current solutions or connected to them using a variety of available delivery mechanisms.
• Ultimately be engaging to applicants. It’s a job applicant’s market, and your company must seek to engage and respect each applicant. Gone are the days when top talent was grateful for a job and would remain committed to your organization through retirement. Shaker Consulting Group’s assessments recognize that applicants are thinking beings rather than merely subjects to be studied by a black box process.

Virtual Job Tryout®

Shaker Consulting Group’s premier assessment offering is the industry-leading Virtual Job Tryout®. This unique and innovative candidate evaluation is built specifically for your organization, to drive performance outcomes that matter to you. Click here for an article from HR Magazine. Not only does the Virtual Job Tryout® give your hiring managers the best information with which to make a hiring decision, it also presents your candidates with an intriguing and educational view of the job so that they can understand the job's true opportunities and challenges.

The Virtual Job Tryout® is designed for leading-edge, brand conscious organizations. If you are interested in attracting the best quality candidates with a process that is automated, efficient, and maximally predictive of job success, contact Shaker Consulting Group today for a demo. Click here to learn more about The Virtual Job Tryout®.

Assessments are developed specifically for different stages of
the application process:

• Screen
• Full Assessment
• Interviewing

Shaker Consulting Group’s approach to assessments is geared toward giving you quick customization, using our proprietary database of over 250 assessment topic areas.

What’s more, our web-enabled catalog allows us to deploy assessments that fit your unique culture and role, quickly and inexpensively.