Why 15-Page Competency Assessment Reports Get Locked Away in Drawers

Companies pour significant resources into identifying and developing core talent, yet, for all the budget invested, the resulting reports rarely drive actual operations or shape organizational strategy. This is a pervasive challenge facing HR organizations globally.

Typically, these reports are overlooked for two primary reasons:

1. Skepticism among employees regarding the reliability and objectivity of the data
2. A limitation of strategic scalability

These hurdles create a practical bottleneck, preventing HR from realizing its vision of supporting employee growth and securing a strategic seat at the leadership table. However, it is crucial to recognize that this skepticism, voiced by employees and executives alike, does not reflect the HR team’s competency or commitment. Rather, the fundamental issue lies within the limitations of traditional assessment methodologies that attempt to fit human subjectivity into objective data.

In this article, we break down the three key limitations that cause traditional competency diagnostic reports to fail.

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1. Limitations of Competency Assessment Criteria and Assessors

Intensive assessment tools used for identifying core talent, such as Behavioral Event Interviews (BEIs) or In-baskets, ultimately rely on the interpretation of professional assessors. While these assessors undergo specialized training, the limitations stem not from a lack of expertise, but rather from the inherent nature of human-based scoring methods.

First, the dilemma embedded in evaluation guides

Consider a common evaluation indicator “analyzed and acted upon the situation appropriately.” Here, the degree of “appropriateness” inherently varies from assessor to assessor. One might attempt to resolve this by creating a hyper-detailed guide with dozens of pages defining the exact parameters of what qualifies as “appropriate.” But no assessor can realistically memorize and apply such exhaustive criteria. Instead, facing cognitive overload, they end up filtering and applying only the criteria they personally deem important.

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Second, the practical dilemma faced by assessors

Human thought evolves with experience. The same assessor scoring the same response months apart may reach two different conclusions. Add to this the difficulty of consistently securing top-tier industry HR experts due to cost, time and availability.

Ultimately, organizations frequently find themselves operating within a degree of compromise, with results shaped by “inherently ambiguous evaluation guides” and “assessors with uneven levels of experience and expertise.”

Within this setup, identical responses can receive very different scores. And once scoring consistency begins to break down, assessment results shift from being a foundation for coaching to a source of debate.

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2. Limitations of context-stripped competency assessment data

Most 15 to 20 page assessment reports are filled with numbers, charts and brief comments. But a score like “strategic thinking: 2.8” reveals almost nothing on its own. It doesn’t explain which part of the respondent’s answers justified the score, why their performance rose above a lower level, or what kept them from achieving a higher one.

As a result, leaders and HR teams struggle to translate these reports into actionable growth guidance. The problem is that the reports rarely make clear whether an individual lacks long-term vision, struggles with competitor trend analysis or falls short in data-driven decision-making.

Likewise, feedback without concrete evidence and clear next steps offers little value to the person being assessed. From an organizational perspective, such data lacks the necessary depth to drive development strategies.

In the end, organizations are left managing superficial data, diluting the impact of competency assessments on both individuals and their companies.

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3. Limits of small sample sizes that never feed into company-wide strategy

‍The final challenge is that the data produced by traditional assessments rarely makes its way into management’s strategic decision-making.

Highly reliable methods like BEI and In-basket assessments demand significant time and cost from experienced assessors. Naturally, this high-cost structure limits assessment to a small pool of designated key talents.

But when assessments are limited to a handful of individuals, they not only deprive the broader workforce of meaningful development opportunities but also undermine data-driven decision-making. Insights drawn from only a few key talents function more like high-cost sample data than a representative snapshot of the entire organization. Building company-wide talent strategies on such a narrow base amounts to making decisions with glaring statistical blind spots.

Consider a company beginning its shift toward cloud-based services. Here, HR must answer the question, “what level of cloud-related competencies does our company currently have?” If assessment data exists only for a few key individuals, HR loses the chance to build a company-wide database, namely, a skill map or skill inventory.

A New Standard to Overcome These Limits, Telta

Traditional assessment efforts have broken down for three core reasons: (i) the inability to quantify qualitative data; (ii) context-stripped data; and (iii) the inability to build a company-wide skill map. However, AI is creating a new standard to overcome these limits.

Telta directly tackles these three limits with AI. It replaces human interpretation with consistent, AI-driven evaluation criteria, delivers behavioral evidence backed by data rather than superficial information, and makes a company-wide skill map cost-efficient.

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