Developing a Behavior-Based Rubric for Assessing Professional Skills During Hiring

Modern engineers are expected to possess strong leadership, creativity, and communication skills in addition to being technically savvy (NAE, n.d.). A recent trend in the engineering hiring process is the inclusion of team-building games used to analyze engineering candidates for professional skills. Current methods of evaluating candidates, such as behavioral interviews, are subjected to bias, with evaluators scoring candidates based on broad and inconsistent definitions of traits, and their own perceptions of how well candidates demonstrate these traits (Personal Communication, Engineering Human Resource Manager, 2014). This paper describes a research-informed process for creating a valid and reliable rubric for assessing professional skills in hiring. Step-by-step comparisons are made between rubric development in academic and industry settings, along with a guide for utilizing and analyzing survey responses to inform rubric development, and conducting inter-rater reliability with rubrics. Implications from this guide contribute to further understandings of rubric development in industry.