gr8.tech
The Challenge
gr8.tech wanted to measure candidate alignment with the company's values. The design problem was discriminant validity. Off-the-shelf values inventories produce ceiling effects: on a Likert scale, almost everyone rates almost every prosocial value as important. An instrument where nearly all candidates score near the top tells you nothing about the differences between them — which is the entire point of running an assessment.
The Approach
The fix was format combination. Forced-choice for the core values items, so candidates had to trade off things they would otherwise all endorse; ranking, to reveal relative priority; and situational-judgment items, to ground abstract values in concrete workplace behavior. The feedback layer then translated the results back into gr8.tech's own operating language, so hiring managers read alignment to the company's stated values rather than raw trait scores.
Results
- Values assessment that produces discriminating distributions instead of a ceiling
- Three complementary formats: forced-choice (core values), ranking (relative priority), situational judgment (behavior in context)
- Feedback layer reporting in the company's own operating language, not raw psychometric scores
- Designed for hiring decisions where values-fit had to be measured, not just asserted
The trade-off in this design is real: forced-choice assessments are harder to construct, harder to score, and produce ipsative rather than normative data. But Likert-format values inventories hit ceiling effects so reliably that running one would have produced unusable distributions on the same content — so I designed around forced-choice from the start rather than discovering the problem after the fact.
The situational-judgment layer did the work that self-report can’t: it separates candidates whose stated values match their behavioral instincts from candidates who can articulate the right values without acting on them. The whole instrument was an exercise in discriminant validity — building something that actually distinguishes people on a dimension where most measures don’t.
Designed at Gyfted. The wider case for custom measurement is in How to Measure Employee Engagement When Gallup’s Numbers Don’t Fit Your Org.