I mostly agree with this, but I definitely think that there’s an important caveat: if the thing you are looking for involves multiple dimensions of a person to be at least adequate on a certain threshold and the sum of the dimensions to be as high as possible… that’s a different restriction than just high-sum-with-no-thresholds. The more restrictive version means that you may in fact have a much smaller potential hiring pool than you imagine.
If, for example, you need the person to be highly trustworthy / value aligned, and reliable (generally doesn’t flake on their commitments, accomplishes what they say they will), and technically competent in multiple ways. If being really good at two of those, but failing on the third means that the person overall wouldn’t be a good hire… you might actually get a lot of value out of spending more on the hiring search process in order to get fewer false negatives.
What might this look like? I think you actually want to go to the effort of making a few different tests (at least 2, more if you can afford it), and allowing people to take a different test after failing (if they are sufficiently motivated). If the tests are sufficiently different from each other, this gives you a chance to catch a few false negatives who might otherwise have gotten ruled out due to an unlucky mismatch with the first test.
I mostly agree with this, but I definitely think that there’s an important caveat: if the thing you are looking for involves multiple dimensions of a person to be at least adequate on a certain threshold and the sum of the dimensions to be as high as possible… that’s a different restriction than just high-sum-with-no-thresholds. The more restrictive version means that you may in fact have a much smaller potential hiring pool than you imagine.
If, for example, you need the person to be highly trustworthy / value aligned, and reliable (generally doesn’t flake on their commitments, accomplishes what they say they will), and technically competent in multiple ways. If being really good at two of those, but failing on the third means that the person overall wouldn’t be a good hire… you might actually get a lot of value out of spending more on the hiring search process in order to get fewer false negatives.
What might this look like? I think you actually want to go to the effort of making a few different tests (at least 2, more if you can afford it), and allowing people to take a different test after failing (if they are sufficiently motivated). If the tests are sufficiently different from each other, this gives you a chance to catch a few false negatives who might otherwise have gotten ruled out due to an unlucky mismatch with the first test.
Excellent additions!