What is job relatedness and how can you use it to create better skills assessments?

Job-relatedness is a key concept in recruiting. It looks at whether the requirements (AKA “criteria”) of a job – including skills and qualifications – are related or relevant enough to the job to justify the company requiring them.

This concept is important to various aspects of hiring – where your job requirements inform everything from your recruitment materials to your candidate assessments.

Job-relatedness examples

Common features of job-relatedness

Hiring processes with strong job-relatedness typically share these common features. 

• Direct link to job performance and business necessity: In hiring processes with high job relatedness, job descriptions, assessments, and other materials and tools are directly tied to the specific responsibilities of the role and the essential needs of the business.

• Fairness and legal compliance: Job-relatedness keeps the hiring process fair and compliant – especially with employment laws. 

• Measurability and predictiveness of on-the-job success: Hiring tools with high job-relatedness offer clear criteria for judging candidates – and they’re good indicators of how well someone will perform in the job.

What are the benefits of job-relatedness?

Here are three big reasons to care about job-relatedness.

Improved hiring accuracy

Hiring tools that have high job-relatedness directly target the skills that predict job success, so they’ll help you find candidates most likely to succeed. 

For instance, job-related assessments lead to more precise hiring outcomes because they focus on specific, role-based competencies – so candidates who score high on these assessments will perform better than those who score low. Once hired, these candidates typically are happier in their roles and less likely to leave. 

Don’t believe it? Here’s some proof. In our 2024 annual report, we surveyed employers who use skills-based hiring (meaning: they look for candidates with job-related skills, measuring candidates based on these skills). We discovered that they experienced the following benefits: 

• 90% reduced their mis-hires

• 78% reduced their cost-to-hire 

• 81% reduced their time-to-hire

• 91% improved retention

• 90% improved diversity

Meanwhile, employees who looked at multiple job-relevant “measures” (for example, job-related technical skills, soft skills, situational judgment, language proficiency, and more) experienced these benefits:

• 91% reduced their mis-hires

• 83% reduced their cost-to-hire 

• 87% reduced their time-to-hire

• 94% improved retention

• 94% improved diversity

Reduced legal risks

Hiring tools and criteria with high job-relatedness are key in neutral employment practices: practices designed to avoid employment discrimination and keep your hiring practices and employment decisions fair. These help you comply with legislation like the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act – which make it illegal to unfairly disadvantage individuals with disabilities and other protected groups.

Hiring materials and tools that aren’t related to job requirements can be challenged as discriminatory – a compliance officer’s nightmare. 

For example, discriminatory employment tests will measure candidates on areas not essential to the job – and in the process, they’ll discriminate against certain groups of candidates. For example, a clerical employment test might ask, “Can you lift 50 lbs?” This could discriminate against candidates with physical disabilities – especially if the role doesn't typically involve manual labor and these candidates could perform the essential functions of the job just fine.

The reverse is true: Legally defensible hiring processes help you justify your employment actions – like dismissing a candidate because they don’t have the skills you need. 

Say you use assessments with high job-relatedness to select the best candidate for your role – for instance, a typing skills test for a clerical role. In the event of a legal challenge based on national origin, age in employment, disability, or something else, you can show that job-related testing is a business necessity. 

For recruitment managers focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I), a hiring process with built-in job-relatedness also helps foster a culture of fairness.

Streamlined recruitment process

Job-related criteria and tools help streamline the recruitment process, saving time and improving the whole hiring process. By focusing on key competencies that matter for the role, recruitment managers can quickly identify the best candidates – upping candidate quality while keeping time-to-hire low.

This is especially important for growing startups that need to scale quickly while maintaining high standards of accuracy and performance.

🔎Learn more about the legal defensibility of TestGorilla’s assessments, concepts related to job-relatedness (like predictor-criterion congruence), and so much more on TestGorilla’s blog. 

FAQs

1. What is the meaning of job-related criteria?

Any criteria – or job requirements – used during the hiring process or employee performance appraisals must follow the rule of job-relatedness. They must determine and measure skills and other qualities that are directly related to successful job performance and necessary for the business’s operations and success.

2. Why should managers consider the role of job-relatedness in employment?

Managers must make sure their recruitment materials, tools, and processes are job related to improve hiring accuracy, reduce legal risk, and streamline the recruitment process. They must also consider job-relatedness in performance management – they must evaluate and develop their current employees using job-related criteria. 

3. What is a job-related factor?

Job-related factors are anything in the design or management of the workplace and job tasks that can positively or negatively impact an employee’s mental health, engagement, performance, and more. For example, a noisy work environment can make focusing difficult. Employers can make reasonable accommodations – adjustments to work environments or duties – to help employees (especially those with disabilities) manage their well-being and productivity.