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Predictive Talent Assessment overview

Laura Dominoni
Laura Dominoni
  • Updated

What is the Predictive Talent Assessment?

A Predictive Talent Assessment is a tool used to evaluate a candidate’s potential for success in specific job roles. Spark Hire's Predictive Talent Assessment provides deeper insights into candidates’ behavioral competencies, skills, and motivations, helping you make the right hiring decisions.

These assessments go beyond traditional evaluations like personality or cognitive tests, and assess/evaluate the key behavioral competencies, motivations, and traits directly tied to job performance. By analyzing how candidates align with job-specific competencies, Spark Hire’s Predictive Talent Assessment enables you to identify candidates that will perform well in a data-driven, bias free way.

Simple to set up and add to your hiring process, these assessments are ideal for any role, they provide easy-to-read results for your hiring team and a report that you can share with candidates.

Benefits

  • Targeted hiring decisions – The assessments evaluate candidates’ competencies, such as problem-solving, teamwork, and leadership, offering a comprehensive view of how well a candidate aligns with the job requirements. This data-driven approach reduces guesswork, leading to more accurate and informed hiring decisions.
  • Workplace motivation insights – The assessment evaluates candidates’ workplace motivation based on three key competencies: Advocate, Belong, and Contribute. Adding Workplace motivation to a Predictive profile helps you find candidates who will positively represent the organization, feel connected to its goals, and put in extra effort to help it succeed.
  • Faster hiring process – With instant access to easy-to-read reports after completion, hiring managers can make quicker, more efficient decisions.
  • Reduced bias – The assessments are built on over 50 years of peer-reviewed scientific research, designed to minimize bias and get reliable and consistent results. The assessments focus on job-related skills and competencies, ensuring fair results across diverse candidate pools. Learn more about the assessment’s validity and fairness.
  • Improved team performance – Organizations can build stronger, more cohesive teams by identifying candidates with the right behavioral traits and skills for specific roles.
  • Holistic evaluation – Unlike personality or cognitive tests, Spark Hire’s Predictive Talent Assessments take a multidimensional approach by evaluating a range of competencies. This provides a well-rounded view of a candidate’s potential, ensuring they’re a good fit not just for the role, but also for the company culture.
  • Integration with video interviews: Spark Hire’s platform seamlessly integrates assessments with video interviews.

Is the Predictive Talent Assessment right for me?

The Predictive Talent Assessment supports both candidate selection and employee development for every role in your organization. Its versatility ensures accurate, position-specific insights tailored to any job requirements. Whether you're enhancing your hiring strategies or focusing on employee development, the Predictive Talent Assessment offers a solution to help you achieve your goals.

Companies using Spark Hire’s Predictive Talent Assessment achieved:

  • 46% faster time-to-hire
  • 23% boost in team productivity compared to teams that did not use Spark Hire’s Predictive Talent Assessment
  • 20% revenue growth compared to teams that did not use Spark Hire’s Predictive Talent Assessment

Data from independent studies by Aberdeen Group and CSO Insights to assess Spark Hire's Predictive Talent Assessment validity

How does the Predictive Talent Assessment work?

Spark Hire’s Predictive Talent Assessment is simple to implement, with no setup required. The assessment is straightforward to configure for a variety of positions, from individual contributors to management and leadership roles.

Candidates will receive an email invitation to take the assessment and answer multiple-choice questions from any device. The assessment takes under 20 minutes minutes to complete, providing easy-to-interpret results for the hiring team.

As a recruiter or manager, you’ll be able to access these results in a clear report format. You’ll see detailed rankings of each candidate's competencies, their fit for the role, and insights into areas where they may excel or need development.

Predictive Talent Assessments overview 1.png

1. Select a predictive profile

A predictive profile defines the competencies and characteristics ideal for specific roles. The platform supports over 130 competencies to ensure your assessments align with the demands of each position. You can choose from the list of predictive profiles tailored to various jobs.

Create your own custom profiles Greater flexibility will be available by creating your own custom profiles, launching in 2025.

2. Invite candidates to take the assessment

Spark Hire understands that a positive candidate experience matters, which is why it provides a user-friendly assessment process that makes it easy for candidates to navigate and complete their evaluations.

  • Candidates will receive an email invitation to take the assessment and answer multiple-choice questions.
  • The assessment includes 118 multiple-choice questions, takes under 20 minutes to complete, and can be taken on any device, desktop or mobile.
  • Clear instructions are provided for candidates, ensuring they understand what to do at every step.
  • The assessment supports multiple languages, making them accessible to a diverse candidate pool.
  • You can customize the assessment with your logo and brand colors to enhance employer branding.

3. Our platform scores the assessment

After candidates complete the assessment, our platform ranks them across various dimensions, including emotional intelligence and motivation. This ranking provides a detailed breakdown of each candidate's strengths and areas for improvement for the specific role for which they are evaluated.

Assessment scoring is grounded in data from over 1,000,000 assessment takers and over 40 years of research conducted by industrial-organizational psychologists and supported by numerous validation studies. Learn more about our Predictive Talent Assessment content validity and fairness.

The assessment has strong reliability, which means that scores remain the same over time (5 years).

While candidates may have varying scores across competencies, having a few low scores doesn’t mean they can’t succeed—it just indicates where challenges may arise.

4. See the candidate’s fit for the role

Evaluate candidates based on their fit for the role by sorting them according to their assessment scores. Our platform provides hiring teams with clear and actionable insights, allowing you to explore results in detail and understand each candidate's potential performance and alignment with your team.

The Predictive Talent Assessment provides multiple insightful reports from a single assessment, which include:

  • An overall fit score based on the candidate’s capacity to succeed in a specific role (shown in the Hiring report).
  • Percentile scores for each of the job competencies that make up your predictive profile. Clicking on each competency will provide additional details about the competency, what the candidate's rating means, and guidelines for coaching the candidate to help them develop and improve.
  • A Workplace Motivation Score is included when required for the Predictive profile, along with scores for three underlying competencies of Advocate, Belong, and Contribute.

Predictive Talent Assessments overview 2.png

5. Download and share reports

Spark Hire’s assessment reports are designed to be clear and easy for any hiring team member and candidates to understand—no specialized training or psychology background is required. All reports include:

  • A summary page
  • An overview page for each section that allows to see all rankings at a glance
  • Clear labels and an accompanying legend for score interpretation
  • Simple titles for easier navigation

These reports not only assist managers in making informed hiring decisions but also offer value to candidates who have invested time in the hiring process.

For managers – The available reports are the Coaching (see example✍️ ) and Hiring (see example ✍️) reports, which include:

  • Explanations for each competency
  • Insights into the candidate’s ratings
  • Coaching tips to guide development

For candidates – The Individual report (see example✍️) is available and provides:

  • Rankings for motivations and habits, presented in a clear, easy-to-read structure for candidates.
  • Results that focus on insights without categorizing them as positive or negative, independent of the predictive profile defined for the job.
  • Transparency about assessment results, along with growth recommendations to help candidates develop further.
If you’re a legacy customer, see this article for more information on reports.

Supported languages

  1. PDF reports for recruiters and managers, including the Hiring and Coaching reports, are available in:
    • English
    • Spanish (Latin American)
  2. Candidate experience, including the Predictive Assessment Form and the Individual Report, is available in:
    • Cantonese
    • Chinese Simplified Mandarin
    • Chinese Traditional Taiwan
    • Danish
    • Dutch-Flemish
    • English
    • Finnish
    • French
    • French Canadian
    • German
    • Hebrew
    • Hungarian
    • Italian
    • Japanese
    • Korean
    • Malay
    • Polish
    • Portuguese (Brazilian)
    • Russian
    • Slovenian
    • Spanish (European)
    • Spanish (Latin American)
    • Swedish
    • Tagalog
    • Thai
    • Turkish

Upcoming functionality

In 2025, the platform will introduce several new capabilities:

  • Custom Predictive profiles: Create and manage role-specific profiles.
  • Best-fit matching: Identify top roles for candidates or top candidates for roles.
  • Enhanced export options: Export assessments with metadata in a CSV format.
  • Report sharing: Share reports with peers directly from the platform.
Integrations with ADP Workforce Now and other platforms are planned to be added in the second half of 2025.

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