Here’s my abstract to the my clarifications: I think pre-employment assessments are most beneficial in helping the hiring manager know how far they need to adapt their own style in order to engage, empower, coach, lead the new employee. If that’s the greatest criteria for a successful hire, it may be needed to be done pre-employment or let God guide through lots/dice and then do the assessment and ask for God to stretch the manager. If God is ‘for’ the company—and we’re truly seeking His guidance in our prayer and not just His stamp of validation on our plans—He won’t want it to fail and so the lots/dice will reveal the candidate who will be successful under that manager.
Let me say, that these are serious explorations of the topic and not just a poke to spur discussion, such as playing devil’s advocate to determine if people really believe what they sell or teach.
Interestingly, later in the scriptural record the apostles didn’t use lots/dice to chose the seven to serve the Hellenistic widows—just prayer after determining some qualifications (wisdom, full of spirit/Spirit—and I write it that way because Stephen is described as full of the Holy Spirit and the others aren’t; the notation is either redundant or there’s a distinction similar to Paul being compelled by the spirit/Spirit to go to Jerusalem but warned by the Holy Spirit of what will happen if he goes). Thus, the hiring process wasn’t consistent—or consistently recorded—in the early church organization.
One of the key uses of a pre-employment assessment is to ascertain how well the candidates fit a profile of a successful employee in that position. If you had to do an assessment to hire an apostle, what would be the perfect profile? It’s interesting that Christ—perfect in doing all assessments—doesn’t choose a single type to be an apostle, a role in the church different apparently from shepherd, teacher, evangelist, and prophet (though the group of apostles seem to perform each of those at times) according to the epistles. We have the Thunder-ous James and John (sons of thunder). We have stubborn, impulsive, self-assured, insightful, sometimes angry Peter, labeled by Christ as a ‘son of Jonah/John’—a prophet who also exhibited these characteristics. We have a zealot, a tax collector (don’t know if they had a personality type as our accountants today or our modern-day scam artists), someone who comes from dual cultures (Bartholomew—son of Ptolemy, a Greek, the son a Jew through his mother), and so on. We know they had different vocational backgrounds so it’s not experience that was important.
In fact, the first disciples thought they were signing up to follow a rabbi in order to be a rabbi just like this Y’shua of Nazareth. Some commentators have pointed out that if the disciples were doing other jobs, they failed at being good enough to be a rabbi—to be good enough to follow in Christ’s footsteps—according to the world’s criteria; they were essentially school drop-outs because school was designed to create rabbis. You might say that Christ is revolting against the human perspective and policies designed to create successful religious leaders; He might be saying, “I take the drop-outs, the ones that fail the assessments, and turn them into successes.” (Was Christ Himself a school drop-out, never a rabbi’s disciple, because we believe He worked as a teknon?) We don’t have any indication that the apostles had similar personalities, behaviors, aptitudes, world views, etc. You have to admit as organizational leaders they were highly successful.
As to the right kind of person in the right seat, look at Acts 9:28-31. Paul comes back to Jerusalem after his conversion, learning and early preaching in Damascus and Arabia. There are problems. The apostles suggest he leave for home, Tarsus, and they help him go. “Then the churches...enjoyed peace, edification and added to their numbers.” (Paraphrase) Indications are that Paul’s presence hindered the churches from having peace, and so on. From this, Paul was clearly ministering to the wrong people though he had the right skills. He was selected correctly to be a preacher/teacher, apostle, evangelist—like Peter. Somehow the choice of being in Jerusalem, the headquarters, was incorrect. He needed to be establishing new branch offices and helping them grow. What assessment would have figured this out?
Additionally, the disciple among the twelve allowed to handle the money and secure it was not Matthew, the tax collector—the guy with the most experience handling and securing money. That job was Judas’. Thus, experience was not a criteria for their specific roles.
I agree if assessments are done before hiring then yellow and red flags can appear. And if they’re not heeded, it can be a bad hire—or poorly managed/led employee. We do spend a lot of money when hiring isn’t done well. But what is the right profile could be asked again? Assessments are objective—they seem to meet the accuracy and reliability criteria (each measures what they purport to measure, and the same results appear when the same person takes them—i.e. I don’t get a “musician” designation one time and a “carpenter” designation the next time I take it unless something has dramatically changed in my life).
But the main objection to the reason for doing pre-employment assessments is to find a person with the right fit. And I don’t think that can be done. 1) We override the assessments because we really want to hire the likable person. And likability can mean they fit in—people we trust because they deem important the same trust dynamics I think are important e.g. dependability—and they get along with the leadership style, my leadership style for example. And that’s almost always the person who will not compete with me as a leader. Hypothetical: I’m trying to hire a successor. If I’ve been a successful leader for a team that makes me successful, I would want to hire someone like me. But that person wouldn’t work for me; I wouldn’t work for me. That’s not going to be a successful hire. So here’s the dilemma, right? (Perhaps Paul too couldn’t be in the same place as Peter because their preaching/teaching, evangelism, apostleship overlapped too much.)
2) Different kinds of people have been successful in the same job roles, because they’ve performed the job in their own way. We don’t have rigorous validation that certain types or aspects of profiles are going to be successful in particular roles. We often think extroverts need to lead companies but there seems to be plenty of evidence that introverts do just as well if not better. I had a review of purchasing roles in one of the companies I helped lead. I defined some criteria. After taking the assessments, two people who were both good at the jobs in different ways overlapped with some of my criteria but not completely. And they differed in which criteria they met. If I were to hire a third person, would I keep looking for the perfect fit to what I think makes a successful purchasing agent or hire a person who, like the current two, at least fits half/two-thirds of the criteria?
Assessments are low cost, relative to the cost of hiring mistakes, but they don’t prevent hiring mistakes. If I hire a person who fits in and gets along with the leadership style, it’s not a mistake but they may not have the best choice—of course, I’ll never know anything about a choice not taken. I agree that assessments will help me lead the team better—to engage them more, to better coach them, and so on. If this is true, then the only reason for doing pre-employment assessments is to gage whether the hiring manager (e.g. me) can engage with them, coach them by adapting my ‘style’ to what they need. If their type is too much of a stretch for me to adapt, then it’s going to be a bad hire. Christ was perfect and unlimited in adapting. Me, us—not so capable. So then, what’s wrong with letting God guide the hiring choice through casting lots, rolling dice? He would be the best to help us know which candidate I can coach. We only have to have faith, trust in Him. Or is there something in addition to Him that we need? The right answer, and difficult answer to live with, is there is nothing else that we need besides Him to guide us.
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