Recruiting the right candidate for a job may be challenging, particularly given the scarcity of top talent and their expectations about compensation and job duties. It takes a month and a lot of money to hire a new employee. Skill assessment tool can help companies find the right candidate for their organisation.
However, the problem is the traditional recruiting methods of getting to know candidates’ knowledge because resumes often do not give the best insight. Resumes are unreliable, and research tells us that up to 78% of resumes comprise misleading statements, while 46% have actual lies.
Interviews — especially the unstructured ones — are subjective and serve as poor predictors of job performance. Companies should tread carefully because of how tedious, time-consuming, and expensive hiring is.
Types of skill assessments test
Every job has different requirements, that’s why each company evaluates a candidate’s knowledge differently. Some of the commonly used skill assessments include the following points.
- Job knowledge tests evaluate the candidates on their knowledge of a particular subject.
- The pre-employment cognitive assessment focuses on the candidate’s mental aptitude and verbal or logical reasoning.
- Questionnaires help determine the candidate’s personality by categorising them on criteria such as extraversion, leadership, or assertiveness.
- Culture fit tests evaluate whether a candidate will fit in with the work culture by assessing the alignment of the candidate’s values with the organisation’s.
- Situational judgement tests assess candidate responses to workplace scenarios. Such tests help candidates understand how you prioritise tasks, handle pressure, follow instructions, etc.
Read More: How Can Pre-employment Tests Boost Recruiting Process?
Steps to choose the right skill assessment tool for your company
Recruiting suitable candidates for a job can be difficult. Candidates with the right skills are hard to find, and it’s essential to match their expectations with the reality of the job. All a company wants is to ensure a strong correlation between skill assessment tools and job performance.
While predicting every aspect of a prospect might not be possible, recruitment technology such as skill testing software significantly improves compared to resume screening and gut-based hiring.
It helps to speed up the process and make fairer, more accurate decisions. Here is how you can choose the perfect tool for your hiring needs:
Define your objectives
Many skill assessment tools are available today, meaning you must have specific goals in mind when choosing. Do you want to speed up the recruiting process? Or do you want to focus on hiring skilled executive-level candidates? Accordingly, see how each tool’s features match up.
Have your research on each tool
Once you have shortlisted your options, could you read up on them? And by that, we do not just mean their company blog or features page.
Check their case studies of how they have helped customers and read testimonials on capterra and other softwares feedback sites to get an idea of the vendor’s reputation, the kind of customization they offer, and the customer support they provide.
If you know someone who has used the tool, contact them for an honest opinion. Send the request to the tool vendor for a demo.
Check the flexibility of tool
You will want to customise the assessment tool to reflect your brand’s aesthetic and ethos, so make sure the tool vendor offers you a lot of flexibility. Can you easily cut and paste elements as needed, including your company logos and colours?
Also check, How many applicants can handle the tool, and how many different types of assessments does it support at once? As more applicants take the test and gather more data, you need to modify skills tests as necessary.
Check for integration with your current technology
Your brand already has some recruitment-related software in place, and the assessment tool should integrate easily with the software for maximum convenience.
For example, if you use an ATS, it makes sense to have the pre-employment evaluation tool synced up. Ideally, you should be able to do the syncing yourself, or the tool vendor should do it quickly and promptly.
Check the validity of the test data
The validity of any testing tool should be easy to assess in light of the parameters you set for your job. For example, how well does the test criteria align with your job description?
How accurately can the results predict employee performance on the job, and how do those results compare with other tests of similar criteria?
With your ideal skill assessment tool, the answer to all three should be ‘a lot,’ Ask the tool provider about the scientific validity behind the skill assessment tests and request proofs as and where relevant.
Track the test completion rates
Studies show that 70% of hiring managers are convinced that the hiring process needs to be more data-driven to deliver genuine business impact. Therefore, you need a tool that can quickly provide statistics on how test completion is going.
Keep an eye on metrics such as the average time spent in the whole assessment test, average completion rate, average time spent per question where the most drop-offs occurred, and so on.
This will help you tweak the test in order to better suit candidates, by reducing the length or changing the question format.
Wrapping up:
Talent is more demanding than ever in this day and age, and businesses are fast equipping themselves with top-notch recruitment tech.
A skill assessment tool can help improve the recruiting selection process smoothly. And an organisation that makes good hiring decisions tends to have higher productivity and lower attrition rates, which positively influence the bottom line.
