Recruitment is a tough job that significantly impacts the organization’s growth and success. It is not only about posting jobs and conducting interviews, it is about attracting the right talent to apply for a job and then selecting the best-suited candidate for the job.
And, if a recruiter comes across two candidates with similar backgrounds, qualifications, and experience, how is the recruiter going to decide which of the two candidates is more suitable for the company?
This is exactly where talent assessment comes into place.
What is Talent Assessment? Talent Assessment is a process that helps recruiters get invaluable insights into the skills, cognitive abilities, competencies, behavior, work style, and other aspects of the talented pool of candidates who apply for a job.
This process makes it easy for recruiters to understand whether a candidate is a good fit for the job role.
It also gives them an idea of the potential benefits the candidates can bring to the table and whether they are going to stay with the organization for a long time because as per a recent study, 92% of organizations that used talent assessment tools have seen a reduction in mis-hires.
Basically, talent assessment helps you filter out the candidates who might not be suitable for your company based on several criteria, such as hard skills, knowledge, soft skills, cognitive abilities, behavioral, and cultural.
A few years ago, not many organizations believed that a candidate needs more than skills to fit in a job role.
However, today, it is extremely essential for both companies as well as employees to fit with each other in every aspect. And, talent assessment helps you find that perfect fitting candidate for your company.
Types of Talent Assessments There are several different types of talent assessment tests to identify a candidate’s abilities to perform in different situations and spheres.
Technical Assessments Technical assessment assesses the candidates on their technical abilities or coding skills. Several skill assessment tools in the market are designed to efficiently test coding and other technical skills of job applicants and provide a cumulative report after ranking the participants according to their performance in the test.
WeCP offers skill assessment tools that can help you judge your job applicants on their knowledge of programming languages and technologies.
Some Technical Assessment Examples:
Communication Skills Assessments Using this type of assessment, you can check your candidates’ proficiency in communication skills in areas like grammar, fluency, pronunciation, comprehension, and listening skills in a particular language.
Some Communication Skills Assessments Examples:
Psychometric Tests Such tests assess candidates based on their numerical, logical, and verbal abilities. They help evaluate candidates’ fundamental intelligence levels and whether they have the aptitude and attitude that relate to performing at the workplace.
Behavioral Tests These tests help you judge whether a candidate fits in the company behaviorally. This means that with a behavioral test, you will be able to evaluate whether a candidate is able to manage work issues, grievances, challenges, and difficult circumstances in line with the ethics, rules, and principles of the company.
Cognitive Ability Tests Tests to evaluate the cognitive ability of candidates showcase their skills in decision-making, reasoning, prioritizing, problem-solving, and memory. Such tests allow you to understand the candidate’s potential in performing functions at the job.
How to Conduct Talent Assessment Tests Apart from the classic tests that have been there in the recruitment industry, for what seems like, ages now, there are a few newer types of tests that can help recruiters in evaluating the job applicants. Here are a few types of tests to evaluate candidates.
Objective Tests Companies test their candidates on aptitude and technical skills using objective tests, called MCQs or multiple-choice questions. These tests are simple to evaluate because they are objective in nature and can be evaluated using tools within minutes.
Such MCQs can easily be conducted for any number of candidates using software tools meant for skill assessment, such as WeCP. These tools can easily produce results and rank candidates on the basis of their performances, minimizing human intervention in the talent assessment process.
👉 Read More: How UST Uses WeCP to Transform Candidates into Skill-Mapped, Project-Ready Talent
Work Samples In some types of jobs, talent assessment is best done through work samples, paid or unpaid. Candidates are given a piece of actual work to perform within a certain timeframe. Based on whether their work sample is good enough to impress the recruiter or the hiring manager, they get qualified or disqualified for the next stage of the process.
Some profiles that benefit the most when talent assessment is done through work samples are coding, graphics designing, content writing, website designing, UI/UX designing, etc.
Job Simulations Job simulations are similar to work samples, but majorly involve on-the-spot work, rather than take-home assignments. Most of us have heard of the famous job simulation scenario where the interviewer asks the candidate to sell a pen to him. This is a classic example of a job simulation assessment technique.
It basically involves giving the candidate a problem or a situation and assessing him or her based on their response to the problem or the situation. The selection or rejection depends upon how convincing is the candidate’s response to a problem or a situation. It also depends on the attitude and approach of the interviewer.
👉 Read More: How WeCP helped Infosys Evaluate 100k+ Super Coders
Job Trials Job trial is another type of job simulation where a candidate is asked to perform the regular duties that he would be expected to perform if he gets the job. He is also placed in the same environment and team where he is supposed to work post-selection.
Such a technique is usually not possible for all kinds of professions but is best suited for blue-collar jobs like that of a machinist, a factory worker, a labourer, a house help, etc.
Benefits of Talent Assessment If done with efficiency, talent assessment can not only help a ton during recruitment but also in managing the career advancements of the company workforce. With their ability to provide data-driven insights into several traits of an individual, such as behavioral, leadership, aptitude, cognitive speed, accuracy, and emotional intelligence, talent assessment tests have the power to identify the right people for the right positions in the company to ensure the growth and success of the company.
Unconscious Biases are Removed When recruitment is done purely by recruiters, without the use of any technology or tool, unconscious bias is sure to creep into the process. Recruiters are humans and humans have a natural tendency to like or dislike other humans.
However, with the use of skill assessment tools, unconscious bias from the talent assessment process can be removed easily. These test results are entirely based on performance and don’t discriminate between males and females, blacks and whites, rich and poor, etc.
Hiring Process is Optimized Through the use of talent assessment, the overall hiring process becomes more optimized.
This is because conducting interviews for all job applicants requires a significant amount of time, money, and resources compared to the resources used when candidates have successfully passed the talent assessment stage.
Efficiency of Hiring is Improved Since only a talented pool of candidates who qualify for talent assessment tests reach the interview stage, the quality of professionals hired gets improved a lot. Therefore, candidates hired or employees promoted after introducing talent assessment in the recruitment and appraisal processes perform better, thereby building a highly skilled workforce over time.
Employer Branding of the Company is Improved The talent assessment process makes the recruitment process easier, more predictable, and more accessible for the candidates, which in turn improves their overall experience with the potential employer.
Hence, with time, your company’s employer branding in the market gets better, attracting better candidates and improving the overall workforce of the organization.
Talent Pipeline can be Created Once you have the results of the talent assessment tests of all the job applicants, as a recruiter you have the option to shortlist them or disqualify them. Furthermore, all the shortlisted candidates go through the interviews and further get selected or rejected.
However, you can always keep a talent pipeline for a particular job at your organization of all the candidates who passed the talent assessment test as well as those who got disqualified after the test but performed quite well in the test.
Such a talent pipeline comes in handy whenever you have a similar vacancy at your company. You will not have to go through the initial process again and can directly start from the interviews, simplifying the recruitment a lot more.
Conclusion Talent assessment is an extremely important and beneficial step in the recruitment process. It not only improves the quality of hires in the organization but eventually also leads to building employer branding. When done efficiently using software tools, there are significant advantages that a company can reap out of talent evaluation.
At WeCP, we offer skill assessment tests for your candidates as well as employees. You can test both, the hard technical skills and soft skills like communication, problem-solving, and decision-making abilities of all your job applicants and employees. You also get the assessment results from the tool that not only gives individual scores but also ranks all the participants of the tests.
Want to know more on how WeCP can help you out? Try WeCP for free or Schedule a Call with us.
