David, a starting independent business consultant, conducted a human capital audit for a web development and design firm called HeyThereYou .Inc, focused on expansion. With the use of questionnaires, he assessed their entire workforce on innovation, commercial fiber, intrapreneurship, technical expertise, teamwork and organizational skills. When he’s about to formulate the next steps, the CEO interrupts the meeting, visibly frustrated. “Some people in leadership positions haven’t closed any deals in months, and yet they’re scoring top marks? How is that possible?” he says. He points to failed negotiations and missed launch deadlines to finish making his point.
The rest of David’s workshop turns into little more than an exercise in futility. He realized, too late, that his assessment didn’t adequately consider some key business and role-specific priorities. In consulting it’s essential to apply an assessment scoring system that allows for nuanced evaluation. Some of the key things we’ll cover:
So why did David get the leadership evaluation so wrong? Here’s a theory: HeyThereYou .Inc was founded seven years ago and many of the people that were there at the start as technical experts evolved into leadership positions. Logically, their technical expertise is very high, and they have a great sense of intrapreneurship.
But they lack what the company probably needs most in leadership right now. Namely, the commercial fiber and organizational skills to get things moving for expansion. And maybe David’s assessment didn’t take that into consideration.
If David had taken it into consideration, at the very least he would have used custom scoring in his assessment.
At its core, custom scoring involves two key components:
- Assigning points to answer options
- Applying weights to questions, for instance, depending on who’s answering the question
This is exactly where David missed an opportunity. Imagine if his assessment used role-weighted leadership scores. Instead of treating all competencies equally across the board, he could have adjusted the importance of certain aptitudes – like commercial fiber and organizational acumen – based on the respondent’s role and the company’s current strategic priorities.
Bottom line, custom and weighted scoring leads to more tailored evaluations and more personalized recommendations.
Bonus: Custom scoring can also improve the mere experience of the person taking the assessment. How? Combined with a question logic feature. This allows you to display different sets of questions based on scores on previous questions.
Do you have a scored assessment?
Ever since I joined the Pointerpro team, I’ve spoken with almost a hundred of users of our platform – all of which have digitized a unique scored framework to power up their advisory services. Want to discuss how you can do the same?
While custom scoring allows you mostly to personalize the assessment experience and report, dynamic formulas take things a step further. They help you analyze and compare results in smarter ways. Here’s how:
- Sub-scores and combined scores: Instead of one big overall score, you can break it down into specific skill areas by calculating the subscores of specific question groups.
- Benchmarks and percentiles: You can compare someone’s score to a larger group. For example, is this person performing better than 80% of their peers? That kind of context helps people see where they truly stand.
- Gap analysis: This is when you compare how someone rates themselves versus how others (like their manager or team) rate them. If there’s a big difference, that can show blind spots – areas where someone may need to grow, even if they don’t realize it yet.
Even if he had applied custom scoring and role-based weights in his assessment, David still would have lacked the comparative context that dynamic formulas offer.
Firstly, David could have used sub-scores based on the questions that relate to commercial fiber and organizational skills. These would have triggered his awareness of people’s ability – or lack thereof – in closing new deals.
Now, imagine if David had used benchmarks to show how HeyThereYou Inc’s leadership team stacked up against industry norms, or percentile scores to highlight which individuals were truly leading the pack – or falling much too short – not just internally, but relative to the market they were trying to expand into.
If you’re using a scored assessment platform, setting up a percentile score calculation won’t require much more than a few steps. Basically, you’ll need to set up a sequence of formulas. Most likely they will resemble something like this (using our own platform for visual support here):
- Step 1 – Calculate scores per section: Assigning custom scores to all the answer options and/or weights to the questions in your assessment. This is your foundation.
Formula 1 in this simple example is a score calculation for a section that consists of question 1 and 2.
- Step 2 – Determine a rank order: Percentiles are all about where someone “stands” in the crowd. To find that, you need to know everyone’s place in line. If you don’t know who’s in first, second, or fiftieth place, there’s no way to say “You scored better than 80% of people. In the example below a rank order formula is used
Formula 2 builds further on formula 1 – the calculated result of the determined section. In Pointerpro it’s called a rank order formula.
- Step 3 – Count the total number of responses: Percentiles are percentages. That means they need a denominator. You need to know how many people are actually in this assessment “race” to make the math work. If you have 100 respondents, being ranked #10 means something; if you have 10 people, it means something very different.
Formula 3 is now applied to the calculated section: the response count (how many people responded to questions 1 and 2)
- Step 4 – Calculate the percentile: Now you have a formula to determine in what position any given respondent ranks and out of how many they rank. If someone ranks as number #8 and there were 100 respondents, this person is part of the top 8% on the chosen section.
Formula 4 – the final formula – is simply a percentage calculation: rank / response count x 100
- Step 5 – Display the percentile result: Simply showing the percentile score, along with other scores for each respondent at the end of their assessment. With Pointerpro you can take it further and also integrate it in an automated PDF report.
The result of formula 4 is integrated in the assessment report
Let’s assume for a moment that the way David assessed the company’s human potential was through a 360 review process. That means he would have first of all asked each individual to self-assess their proficiencies – like commercial fiber and their organizational skills – through the questionnaire. Plus each individual would have been assessed by other people across the same questions – for instance, their direct reports, and one or two peers (or even key customers).
Very likely, David would have been able to identify some useful gaps he could start addressing in training services after his presentation to the board. As said, thanks to weighted assessment scoring, it would have become clear that some leaders do not have the skill set currently needed to perform as well as needed – a.k.a reel in deals to expand the business. But additionally, a gap analysis of their self-assessment versus how others assessed them, would have surfaced some deeper issues.
Maybe one of the leaders thinks they’ve been organized in recent projects, but their team members see it very differently. Maybe the gap analysis would have revealed the same issue with all of the assessed leaders. That would have allowed David to pinpoint a structural misalignment. Clearly his reporting to the board would have had a lot more impact.
In an assessment tool like Pointerpro, you’d use the Report Builder to set up an individual vs. group report type.
You’d tell your assessment tool which scores to compare – assuming both the individual and the group answered the relevant questions. For example, in the case of David this could have been the questions regarding the infamous commercial fiber and organizational skills.
Your assessment tool would let you create a formula that comes down to this equation:
Self-assessment score – Group average score = Gap.
As you can probably sense from what we’ve discussed so far, there’s a plethora of ways you can use scoring in your assessments.
What you want to get scores on and how you determine these scores will depend on your objective, as a consultant or possibly as an HR leader of a company. In the remainder of this article I’d like to leave you with a few tips that apply broadly but usefully, no matter what your field of expertise is.
Let’s go from a basic setup to a fully professional setup you can have. I assume you’re most likely a Microsoft 365 or Google Workplace user, so I’ll address some tools in these software stacks you probably already have access to. Then we’ll look at an alternative, more focused solution: 360 feedback software.
I started the article talking about David who assessed the workforce of HeyThereYou.Inc on a number of categories:
- Innovation
- Commercial fiber
- Intrapreneurship
- Technical expertise
- Teamwork
- Organizational skills
Have a good look at that list again. Do you notice any overlap?
Commercial fiber and organizational skills – which we’ve discussed at length – are clearly distinguishable. And their combination can provide strong insight into a leader’s ability to drive expansion by finalizing deals. You could say they’re mutually exclusive and together form a collectively exhaustive view of that specific leadership role.
In other words, when assessed and scored separately, they give you distinct, non-overlapping insights. When assessed together, they help ensure you’re covering the full scope of what matters for leadership performance in a growth phase. This reflects the MECE principle (Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive).
However, not everything covered in David’s assessment seems to be consistent with that principle. For instance, consider innovation and intrapreneurship. Is it not so that in order to be a good intrapreneur – someone who comes up with new ideas in their company – a feel for innovation is implied?
Abiding by the MECE principle in assessment scoring ensures that every aspect of an assessed category is considered, without redundancy or omissions. It’s crucial to design a clean assessment from which you want to derive bullet proof conclusions.
This may seem obvious, but it’s a surprisingly common pitfall. Assessments often go wrong when scoring is treated as a generic or stand-alone process, disconnected from the organization’s current focus or challenges.
Take David’s example again: the company was in expansion mode, aiming to secure new business. That context should have dictated a clear emphasis on competencies like commercial fiber, cross-cultural communication, and operational scalability. Instead, his scoring model treated all competencies with equal weight. As a result, someone with deep technical knowledge but minimal sales impact could still end up with a “top score.”
To avoid this, your scoring logic should be a direct reflection of strategic priorities. For instance:
- If leadership mobility is a focus, weigh competencies like change management, team alignment, and decision-making under pressure more heavily.
- If customer retention is a concern, emphasize emotional intelligence, conflict resolution, and account management in your scoring formula.
- If innovation is critical, double down on idea generation, risk-taking, and implementation discipline.
And so on, and so forth. This kind of alignment ensures the output of your assessment actually helps decision-makers – rather than confusing or frustrating them, like David’s CEO.
It’s tempting to build a scoring model that accounts for every edge case, uses layered formulas, and adjusts dynamically across every respondent type. But too much complexity can become a liability rather than a strength. Here’s why:
Especially if multiple team members are involved in setup or updates. For example, if David had started adding conditional scoring weights for each leadership competency but forgot to apply them to certain respondent roles (like mid-level managers vs. C-suite leaders), he might have ended up with results that looked fair on the surface but were comparing apples to oranges.
That inconsistency can go unnoticed – until a stakeholder, like a CEO, calls it out.
In David’s example, the CEO was clearly confused about how someone could score so high if they hadn’t delivered any meaningful results. This confusion often stems from a scoring logic that isn’t transparent enough. If stakeholders can’t trace how a score was arrived at, or if it doesn’t seem to connect to observable behaviors, they’re likely to dismiss the results entirely.
A good rule of thumb: if you can’t explain your scoring logic in two or three sentences to a customer, it’s probably too complex. For any slides or PDF report documents, it’s wise to start with an executive summary section in which you use visuals like score trees or flow diagrams to make it intuitive.
In David’s example, suppose he wanted to add a new competency category or tweak a few questions after his first attempt clearly flopped. If his scoring model had been packed with deeply nested formulas tied together in all kinds of ways, even minor edits could cause errors or break the logic.
One recommendation might be to use as few scoring layers as necessary to get accurate, actionable results. I don’t disagree. As with everything in life it’s best if things are achieved with minimal necessary force.
But I do want to give another recommendation that allows you to get the most out of your assessment tool’s capability: Document your scoring model in a spreadsheet before you start building the assessment.
To give you an example, the following article I wrote about how to build a scored maturity model contains a section where I share my spreadsheet.
Even well-designed scoring models need real-world testing. Piloting allows you to spot issues early, validate assumptions, and fine-tune logic before rolling out the assessment at scale.
Bonus tip: As a consultant, you could approach a prospect of yours and offer them to pilot with them for free (or for a very low cost). That’s one foot in the door right there.
Here’s what a pilot should typically involve, pretty much in this order:
Let’s go back to David’s example one last time. Let’s say he included five different questions in his assessment to measure commercial fiber.
If those questions are all truly tapping into the same competency, you’d expect people to respond to them in a fairly consistent way – someone strong in commercial fiber should score well across all five, and someone weaker should score low across the board. Cronbach’s alpha helps check whether that’s happening.
How is it used in assessments?
Looks complex doesn’t it? Luckily, if you’re not great at math, like me, there are online tools that help you. Like this Cronbach’s alpha calculator.
- If the alpha value is 0.7 or higher, it’s generally considered acceptable.
- 0.8 or higher is good,
- 0.9+ is excellent, though very high values might suggest redundancy – questions that are too similar.
- If the alpha is below 0.7, it may suggest that the items aren’t reliably measuring the same thing – meaning your score for that category (e.g., commercial fiber) might not be trustworthy.
Bottom line, If David had grouped certain questions under “commercial fiber” Cronbach’s alpha would help him validate that this grouping makes sense. A low alpha score would signal he may need to revise or replace certain questions – maybe one of them is confusing, or not aligned with the others.
Wow customers with automated, scored reports
Here’s a quick introduction on how Pointerpro works, brought to you by one of our product experts, Chris.
“We use Pointerpro for all types of surveys and assessments across our global business, and employees love its ease of use and flexible reporting.”
Director at Alere
“I give the new report builder 5 stars for its easy of use. Anyone without coding experience can start creating automated personalized reports quickly.”
CFO & COO at Egg Science
“You guys have done a great job making this as easy to use as possible and still robust in functionality.”
Account Director at Reed Talent Solutions
“It’s a great advantage to have formulas and the possibility for a really thorough analysis. There are hundreds of formulas, but the customer only sees the easy-to-read report. If you’re looking for something like that, it’s really nice to work with Pointerpro.”
Country Manager Netherlands at Better Minds at Work
The final takeaway? Take time to get things right before going live. Smart assessment scoring isn’t just about getting clearer results – it’s the foundation for everything that comes after.
When your scoring model is aligned with your (customer’s) goals, it opens the door to meaningful insights, tailored recommendations, and most importantly, automated reporting that is genuinely personalized.
That’s where Pointerpro comes in. It’s an assessment platform that lets you build custom, scored questionnaires with limitless formula options – and then automatically generates fully personalized reports based on each respondent’s answers and your scoring logic. No manual work, no copy-pasting – just data-driven insights delivered instantly.
Discover Pointerpro and start turning smart assessments into clear, actionable reports at scale.
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About the author:
Jeroen De Rore
As Creative Copywriter at Pointerpro, Jeroen thinks and writes about the challenges professional service providers find on their paths. He is a tech optimist with a taste for nostalgia and storytelling.