Executive Assessments in 2024: The Key Trends to Track

As the new year begins, several trends in leadership selection and development are beginning to emerge for 2024. Pinsight has compiled the top trends noted by the most prominent thought leaders, as well as our perspective.

Trend #1: AI’s Impact on Leadership Assessment.

Coming into 2024, how we have traditionally sourced, assessed, and developed leaders will be changed as AI matures and social media continues to feed these tools more data.

Pinsight’s Perspective: ‘

The process of finding and assessing future leaders will indeed be significantly impacted by the increasing amount of data available for AI analysis. As these technologies evolve in terms of fairness, equity, and legal challenges, Pinsight will continue to embrace the pieces of AI that improve our tech while keeping the candidate experience entirely human. Humans bring a depth of understanding, emotional intelligence, and contextual awareness that are challenging for AI to replicate. A human-centered approach is also much preferred by candidates at this time, with research consistently reporting low trust and fairness perceptions from applicants regarding AI methods for selection and assessment.

Trend #2: The Power of Adaptive and Soft Skills in Leadership.

Soft skills are more important than ever: top talent is looking for leaders who offer empathy, psychological safety, and an authentic leadership style. As leadership processes become more influenced by the tools of AI, it ironically requires leaders themselves to become more human.

Pinsight’s Perspective:

We agree, and Pinsight’s tools are uniquely qualified to manage this critical leadership challenge. Soft skills are often best observed in real-time, authentic interactions. Human assessors can create an environment that allow candidates to showcase their interpersonal skills naturally. This approach goes beyond scripted responses, and provides a more authentic and accurate representation of a candidate’s soft skill capabilities that is crucial to gauge in this new generation of leaders.

Trend #3: Leading with Skills, not Years of Experience.

The talent shortage is only getting more pronounced as the years go on, qualified leaders retire, and few new faces are prepared to take their place. To make up for this, hiring managers have to accept that “years of experience” is no longer the best metric for finding good leadership. In its place, finding candidates with the right set of transferrable skills is going to be how organizations stay competitive and identify high potentials early on.

Pinsight’s Perspective:

While skills-based hiring is a great way to broaden a talent pool and increase the diversity of candidates, the main challenge facing this approach is that recruiters and managers are not well trained in what skills to look for, and applicants are not typically listing skills in their resume. So to close the gap between the theory and the practice, simulations like Pinsight’s take the guesswork out of which roles and experiences translate into relevant skills by directly testing those skills in our virtual environment. Our simulation makes it much easier to make the jump into skills-based hiring by providing an objective and scientifically-backed method for identifying existing skills and leadership potential

Are you interested in how to tackle the emerging trends with Pinsight assessments? Book a free business consultation with us HERE!