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And thanks for listening. Welcome to the H-B-R Idea Cash from Harvard Business Review. I'm Sarah Green.

I'm talking today with Tamas Tormor Music, CEO of Hogan Assessments, Professor of Business Psychology at University College London, and on the faculty at

Columbia University.

He's a frequent contributor to HBR.org, and he's the author of the new magazine article, Ace the Assessment.

Tamas, thank you so much for talking with us today.

My pleasure.

So the article is all about how to score well on the assessments and tests that companies

are increasingly using in hiring and promotion practices, but I'm just wondering as we begin here, how common

are these tests and who's taking them? Are these entry-level jobs, senior jobs?

You know, those are great questions and I would say that on the one hand they are quite common in large organizations

So we estimate that 60 plus percent of organizations with more than 100 employees use them and predominantly for making decisions about incumbents, so current employees.

Typically it would be things such as should

promote this person from an entry-level job or an individual contributor position

to a managerial position. Those are the most common uses. Second most frequent would be for recruitment or

selection, okay? But when we look at the overall market and we also consider smaller

companies and most companies in the world have fewer than 100 employees.

They're really not that common.

They have been increasingly used in the past five years, but my estimate would be that fewer than 40 million of these assessments or tests

...