Every outcome in a business is the product of a decision made somewhere. Hire well, retain a client, launch a product, resolve a complaint - each traces back to someone making a call. The quality of your people's decisions is in many ways the quality of your organisation's output.
Fortunately, decision making is also one of the most measurable traits in hiring. We cover why it matters and, more importantly, how to assess for it accurately in your candidates.
Good decision making determines outcomes at every level of an organisation
The most obvious cost of poor decision making is a bad outcome such as a failed project or a lost client. To fix this, some employers remove decision making privileges from certain employees but this just creates bottlenecks. Senior leaders end up involved in decisions that shouldn't require them, and the people closest to the problem, who have the most relevant context, aren't trusted, or lack the confidence, to act on their own.
A well-oiled organisation needs people at every level capable of making good decisions independently, without constant oversight. The higher the volume of decisions being made across the business, the more costly employees with poor decision making abilities become.
Poor decision making in a role isn't sustainable, and discovering it after someone has been in post for months is an expensive way to find out. It's therefore important to make sure you hire the strongest decision makers in your candidate pool, and so you must assess them on their decision making ability before you hire them.
Cognitive ability is the foundation of good decision making
Cognitive ability is the strongest predictor of job performance across roles and industries (Schmidt & Hunter, 1998). It determines how well someone processes information, weighs competing options, and reaches a valid conclusion. In other words, cognitive ability basically measures decision making.
Each common reasoning assessment type captures a distinct dimension of decision making ability:
- Numerical reasoning - the ability to interpret data accurately and weigh quantitative trade-offs. In practice: evaluating financial options, assessing risk numerically, and making evidence-based calls from data.
- Verbal reasoning - the ability to evaluate written arguments, identify flawed reasoning, and draw valid conclusions from complex information. In practice: navigating competing priorities, assessing proposals, and identifying where an argument breaks down.
- Inductive reasoning - the ability to identify patterns and apply them to novel situations. In practice: making decisions under uncertainty, reasoning from incomplete information, and adapting past experience to new contexts.
Administered online at the start of your hiring process, cognitive ability assessments give you an objective, comparable score for each candidate before anyone has been shortlisted. Candidates who score well have demonstrated their decision making ability.
Gamified assessments add a decision making dimension traditional tests don't capture
Gamified assessments are becoming more popular due to their AI-cheating resistance. However, there is an added benefit of using gamified assessments when assessing decision making skills.
Traditional cognitive ability assessments have question time limits of around 1-2 minutes per question, however most gamified assessments have much shorter time limits of around 10-30 seconds. These shorter time limits and interactive format assess quick-fire decision making on top of core cognitive ability, capturing a candidate's rapid processing and decision making speed.
The gamified format also measures sub-facets that traditional assessments don't reach, including working memory, visual processing and processing speed, which contribute to real-time decision making ability.
Add decision making questions to your structured interviews to probe further
Using cognitive ability assessments helps assess decision making objectively at scale across your initial candidate pool. But decision making is such an essential skill, you should further assess and validate their ability during your interviews. The quality of what you learn from interview answers depends entirely on the quality of the questions.
These are two questions that work well in practice:
- "Tell me about a time when you misjudged a situation and made the wrong decision. What happened, and what did you learn from the experience?"
- "Tell me about a time you were part of making a big decision at work, where you had to weigh the risks and rewards carefully. What was your thought process, and what did you decide?"
Strong decision makers will give detailed and logical answers to both. They acknowledge trade-offs and demonstrate genuine self-awareness about where their reasoning fell short. Weaker decision makers tend to struggle with the first question in particular, sometimes choosing to deflect blame or downplay any errors of judgement.
When asking these questions it's important that you use structured interviews over unstructured ones. Structured interviews will allow you to compare answers objectively.
Conclusion and next steps
Decision making ability is something you can measure in your candidates before you hire. You can measure it by using cognitive ability assessments at the start of the hiring process and structured interview questions to further reveal how candidates reason. Together they give you a very accurate picture of each candidate's decision making skills.
Test Partnership offers several assessments suited to measuring decision making ability:
- Aptitude tests - numerical, verbal, and inductive reasoning assessments for an objective measure of cognitive ability.
- MindmetriQ gamified assessments - a faster, more engaging alternative that captures quick-fire decision making alongside their cognitive ability.
Both are particularly suited to early-stage screening, ensuring you progress only the candidates with the decision making ability your role requires. Or book a call with our team to discuss your hiring needs and get started.
Ben Schwencke
Chief psychologist at Test Partnership. MSc in Organisational Psychology with over ten years experience in psychometric testing.
