Discriminatory prerequisites tender
Regulation aims to reduce corruption, regulate and create fair conditions for corporations and organizations providing services and products to citizens and authorities, with the goal of protecting economic and social interests in the economy.
An online psychotechnical institute is essentially one that has developed and maintains a sophisticated, complex product that requires extensive development and maintenance, which is essentially a product that allows testing from any location and device connected to the cloud.
Its complexity has many aspects, some professional and related to content while others relate to technology, information security issues, support and system user-friendliness, what happens if questions are copied, and more.
But instead of examining the product, we still encounter many tenders with ridiculous and obstructive threshold conditions.
Why should a company developing online tests need to have a physical psychotechnical institute?
Why should it have branches in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem (yes, such a tender exists)?
And why should it have authorization to train interns in an institute it doesn't have?
Or that its team should be headed by an occupational psychologist from the selection field who is also an instructor - to instruct whom?
Note the sophisticated wording one of the competitors asked the tender owners:
"In the spirit of threshold conditions designed to focus on bidders with knowledge and experience relevant to the tender, and similar to other tenders published by the Ministry of Defense that include services with high professional sensitivity in the field of occupational selection, we request the addition of a threshold condition stipulating that the bidder must be a recognized institution for internship in occupational-organizational psychology (a fact that indicates an organization routinely engaged in developing and strengthening its professional quality)"
This is not a fact that supports the questioner's claims; it's a transparent attempt to avoid competition.
There is no connection between the instructors employed at these institutes for many years due to economic considerations,
for example, to employ psychology students (instead of psychologists) and thereby reduce costs, and the online system that the institute has to offer.
This involves mixing concepts and misleading practices that infiltrate threshold conditions:
a. Services of a psychotechnical institute including interviews and various interactions with candidates
b. Online services, separate and distinct from the first type.
Bundling threshold conditions for different types of services
But for convenience or oversight, despite these being different services with separate price proposals that should be submitted separately, the threshold conditions are identical and shared for both types of service, so that in practice and despite the apparent distinction between them, only those with a psychotechnical institute can also compete for the online service (contrary to what is stated in the tender itself).
It's important to note that this article was written in 2021. For some time now, the head of the professional team at Logipass, Ophir Shoval, has been an expert occupational psychologist. Still, the questions and difficulties raised by the article remain valid and raise concerns even today.
Another common problem is the requirement that the development team be headed by a specialized psychologist in social/occupational psychology in the field of testing and selection. Sounds good, right?
But behind this "professional" and innocent requirement lies a serious problem when it comes to an online system: it's clear that the company developing it should have, among others, expert psychologists and/or Ph.D. graduates from the occupational program, excellent programmers, research and statistics professionals, and without them there's no feasibility for the product (this requirement may also originate from bundling services in the threshold conditions).
In any case, there is something wrong with trying to specify the team's qualifications to exclude competitors. In our case, for example, the head of our professional team and one of the system's founders is Dr. Merav Hami, a psychologist and graduate of the occupational program. But in several tenders, they didn't specify that a Ph.D. or expert is acceptable, but only an expert. What's the reason for this?
In our experience, and considering that the number of players in the field is small and well-known, this is not an innocent requirement at all, and that's enough to prevent us from participating in the tender.
An online system is a tool, comparable to a defibrillator or ultrasound. The requirement that the system must be headed by only one type of psychologist harms competition and is irrelevant.
It's certainly possible and even advisable for professional and experienced psychologists in the field to set requirements for examining the tool itself. I assume this was also done in the medical world.
The COVID pandemic has given us a glimpse into the processes required to approve a drug or vaccine.
Another example: we all saw and heard about the COVID vaccine development processes, that there can and should be no shortcuts, that trials must provide all information related to the product such as validity, side effects, required usage and storage conditions, production costs, manufacturing time, and much more information that deals entirely with the vaccine, its production method, the research that preceded it, and the trial results.
Regulation in service of the winners
We have often heard declarations from regulatory bodies and government ministries about the need and necessity to give equal opportunity to small and medium businesses, prioritize periphery areas, and encourage them to participate in public tenders, but this doesn't happen, at least not in this field, and it's very difficult to change.
Many state tenders set threshold conditions that have nothing to do with test quality, but worse and more serious, they prevent and block companies offering products of the highest level (higher than those who do "meet the conditions") from participating - they are disqualified right at the threshold conditions.
We develop online psychotechnical tests, employ several psychologists who are graduates of occupational and clinical programs, headed by Dr. Merav Hami, a lecturer in psychometrics, and still, in most tenders we don't pass the threshold conditions despite having hundreds of thousands of examinees, over 1,500 clients in a wide variety of fields including some of the largest in the market, in addition to high and unique capabilities that our competitors don't have. We have an excellent product and would be happy to submit it for examination and comparison in any aspect, but the threshold requirements leave us out of the competition, which is a loss for us, for the candidates, and for the tender owners.
Examine the product and its advantages
Why not establish these threshold conditions by examining the product itself first? For example:
1. That the developing and maintaining company has a quality assurance standard (ISO-9001).
2. That the developing and maintaining company has an information security standard (ISO-27001).
3. That the developer of the tests themselves is a specialized psychologist with a degree from the occupational program or a psychologist with a Ph.D. from the occupational program.
4. That the product is accessible on various devices (such as mobile phones) and not just desktop computers.
5. Fair scope tests that don't establish an arbitrary advantage such as previous experience with this or that organization, so they will win this tender again and again and again until the end of time?
6. Validity tests, the simplest, most basic approach like Pfizer and Moderna did.
7. That the test system should be based on randomized or adaptive tests, without unprofessional preference for an adaptive system.
8. And more and more, see system advantages.
In conclusion
These are discriminatory threshold conditions that preserve veteran companies lacking innovation and competitiveness through laws and regulations that serve them and only them.
Gabriel Adam, CEO of Logipass.
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