Thomas launches its industry-leading Aptitude assessment on the new Thomas Talent Assessment Platform

Thomas International (@ThomasInt_UK), the global talent assessment platform provider for the mid-market, has announced its industry-leading Aptitude assessment has been added to the new Thomas platform. The new platform, consisting of Thomas Perform and Thomas Profile applications, will begin to be rolled out across Thomas’ global markets after the completion of this initial launch phase in the UK.

The addition of the Aptitude assessment expands the capabilities offered to customers using Thomas’ new platform. The new platform combines 40 years’ experience of recruitment and development assessments, merging psychometric science and benchmark data with the latest technology to help businesses unlock improved business performance through predictive hiring.

The new addition is part of Thomas’ ongoing mission to help businesses identify best-fit candidates, and avoid making costly hiring mistakes. Psychological factors, such as aptitude, are a well-established determinate factor in the long-term success of a candidate in a role. This is of particular importance as organisations look to bounce back after a difficult 2020. 

Thomas Aptitude
The Thomas Aptitude assessment enables organisations to gain a detailed understanding of a person’s general intelligence and how quickly they can grasp the fundamentals of a new role. The assessment measures individuals’ overall speed of learning new information by measuring five distinct aptitudes in separate tests including:

• Their ability to reason
• Their capacity to detect errors
• How well they can process visual information
• Their speed and accuracy when working with numbers
• Their knowledge of word meanings

The benefits of the Aptitude assessment also extend to candidates too; who will be able to access a summary of their Aptitude assessment results free of charge through the Thomas Profile application, providing insights into their own performance and ability that they perhaps weren’t aware of. They can take this insight with them in their next role, using it as a springboard to support with developing their skills within a company.

Tracey Knowles, Head of HR and Talent at sales-i, who used the Thomas Platform during the early access programme to support with recruitment last year says, “The insight that Thomas Perform gives will be more important than ever as businesses begin to reopen after lockdown. With changes in environments, relationships, team structures and our own values, a greater understanding of ourselves and each other will help businesses recover faster and begin to return to normal.” 

Commenting, Sabby Gill, Thomas’ CEO says, “This is just one of the many enhancements we will see roll out across the new platform in 2021 that will help us deliver against the opportunity of predictive hiring for our customers. Through the use of benchmark data, combined with our knowledge and know-how honed over the last forty years, businesses can use Thomas Perform to predict the level of impact candidates will have on business performance and team culture, not just their CV strengths”

Global roll-out of the new Thomas Talent Assessment Platform
The addition of the Aptitude assessment alongside the existing Behaviour assessment marks the beginning of the global rollout of the new Thomas platform. 

The Thomas platform is based on the long-proven science that psychological factors are some of the strongest determinant factors in the success of a candidate in a role. Landmark research from the American Psychology Association (including Frank L. Schmidt & John E. Hunter (1998)) found that higher cognitive ability, abilities ascertained through Aptitude assessments, is directly linked to higher employee productivity and performance in role.

Thomas’ assessments help businesses predict the role and cultural fit of existing employees and new recruitment candidates through enabling them to compare an individual’s profile to those of high-performing employees within a given role. Job profiles can also be created by hiring managers to reflect the preferred aptitudes and behavioural traits of their ideal candidate. This insight enables SMEs to identify ‘best-fit candidates’ quickly, consistently and objectively, free from unconscious bias, something that businesses need even more so now as they look to move forward with confidence in the new year. 

Gill continues: “2020 was a difficult year for many businesses, and as they look to bounce back, many will be looking to grow and as a result hire more people. But they’ll also likely be working with less resources and addressing a larger candidate pool than in previous years as a result of the pandemic. So it’s even more critical that they make the right hiring decisions.

“Best-fit candidates prove to be quicker and easier to onboard, require less training, deliver value faster, are more productive and tend to stay longer in organisations. All of these factors will help companies both improve top line performance and reduce operating costs. Hiring best-fit candidates is also a positive result for individuals. Those in a job and culture that best suit their aptitudes, behavioural and personality traits are more likely to have a higher feeling of well-being and job satisfaction.”

About the Thomas platform
Thomas’ Talent Assessment Platform, which was launched in September 2020, consists of two applications – Thomas Perform and Thomas Profile. Utilising the company’s 40 years of candidate assessment experience, combined with the latest technology, the platform is designed to make complex psychometrics easy to understand and use, turning insights into people’s diverse characteristics into easy to action recommendations for smarter recruitment and development decisions.