When XYZ Company was hiring a new administrative assistant, Molly Felder seemed the perfect fit. She was articulate, experienced in secretarial skills, and eager for the job.

Three months later, she quit. Although she'd been tested for her office skills in such areas as Excel and Word, she wasn't prepared for the repetitive nature of the job, which entailed formatting data into spreadsheets for hours each day.

But if XYZ had performed a behavioral assessment before she was hired, things might have turned out differently. Such evaluations can help a company find the kind of employee who thrives on the comforting nature of repetitive work, or another who likes the excitement of constantly changing tasks.

Workplace assessments, whether for specific skills or for personality traits, have come a long way in the past decade. "Most, if not all, are predictive of future performance," said Mike Burke, president of the Society for Industrial and Organization Psychology in Bowling Green, Ohio.

With a great degree of certainty, such assessments can help predict how a certain candidate will do in terms of job performance, turnover and absenteeism, Burke said. "That can have substantial economic value to an organization."

Workplace assessments are on the rise — 68 percent of employers engage in various forms of job skill testing and 29 percent use some form of psychological measurement or assessment, according to a survey by the American Management Association.

In terms of job skills testing, the availability of specific measurement tools has made it possible to obtain very detailed analysis of everyone's skills, from a typist to food service worker to a warehouse clerk.

In those cases, what companies are measuring is a candidate's experience. These procedures really allow them to evaluate someone's hands-on knowledge of the job. Additionally, a behavioral assessment provides a glimpse of how the person will perform in the workplace.

Certainly, "Education, skills and experience can be reviewed from a work history perspective, but personal characteristics are more difficult to evaluate. Someone may have the skills for a job but not be well matched to the position in other ways," said Gail Jern, Westaff's human resources representative. "An example would be someone who is a very careful, meticulous worker who processes their work in a set routine and time frame. If they are placed in a very fast paced environment where they have to multi-task with every changing deadline, they may become very frustrated, lose their focus and possibly become short tempered with co-workers."

Assessments have gotten even better in recent years, Burke said, thanks to greater standardization, improved procedures ensuring their relevance to the job at hand, and technological advances that allow for computer-based individualized assessments that can adapt for prior answers during the testing process.

The best assessments are those created specifically for the job involved. In other words, explained Burke, where organizational psychologists analyze the job or workplace situation and determine the best traits for the position, then write the assessment based on that criteria.

Many clients at Westaff ask their best employees, say in a sales position, to take a personality assessment that checks such things as persistence, ability to overcome obstacles, even competitiveness. Those scores are then used as a benchmark when looking at other candidates.

Most professional assessments, like those used by Westaff, are regulated by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. And companies have to use them fairly and equally across the board, explained Dwight Crain, account supervisor for Profiles International Inc., a Texas-based international workplace testing organization.

Assessments are also judged by their reliability — how well they measure what they are supposed to measure, and validity, which is how well they predict future performance, explained Crain.

However, assessments should never be the only tool used in hiring or promotion decisions. They should really amount to just one-third of the process, "Personal interviews and careful reference checking are two of the most important aspects of making a wise hiring decision," said Jern.