The B-PAD Group, Inc specializes in the development of video test tools that facilitate the selection and assessment of job applicants and promotional candidates in the public safety sector.
B-PAD presents candidates with real situations. Raters then score the candidate’s video responses as they work to resolve each situation. You get to see how effective each candidate is in their handling of these critical incidents.
Why Choose the B-PAD Assessment?
Proven Foundations in Public Safety Selection
Only two approaches of B-PAD found in their review of the public safety selection research literature over more than 50 years that only three approaches to applicant screening are shown to produce consistently valid and practically useful predictions of on-the-job performance:
Validity or Effectiveness of Test Types:
B-PAD validity coefficient: .72 (Technical Report, Study #3, page 5)
Assessment Center validity coefficient: .44 (Hunter and Schmidt, Meta Analysis, 2004)
Structured Interview validity coefficient: .25 (Hunter and Schmidt, Meta Analysis, 2004)
B-PAD is almost 3 times more predictive of future candidate success than a Structured Interview. Work Sample / Performance Tests such as B-PAD are the most predictive test types and B-PAD leads in this category.
Effectiveness of the Job Performance Test
As a starting point in their effort to develop a behaviorally-based public safety assessment tool, the B-PAD test developers analyzed the features of the job performance test that contributed to its effectiveness.
Their study led them to conclude that the strong predictive power of the job performance test is attributable to the fact that:
The questions are all standardized
(every applicant gets the same set of questions)
Questions are job-referenced
(the applicant must imagine himself or herself in the role, responding to a real situation)
The focus of assessment (judgment) is narrow
The raters’ interaction with the applicant is minimal
What Makes B-PAD Unique?
Building on these key components of the job performance test, the B-PAD test developers designed a new assessment tool that is behaviorally focused (i.e., that requires applicants to demonstrate their responses to scenarios rather than merely describe what they would do). The importance of a behavioral focus was three-fold:
Behavioral assessments provide the fairest method of assessment for all ethnic and gender groups
By having applicants role-play their responses rather than describe what they would do, an applicant’s job-relevant interpersonal skills could be assessed—not merely what the applicant says he or she would do
The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA), while placing significant limitations on an employer’s ability to assess an applicant before making a conditional offer of employment, permits an employer at any time to ask an applicant to describe or demonstrate how he or she would perform job-related tasks