Candidate Assessment: The Complete Guide

Finding someone with all the desired skill sets who fits in well with your company culture can be like finding that proverbial needle in a haystack. It usually takes between 33 to 49 days of the recruitment process before you find said needles. [1] This is where candidate assessments come in to save you from the troubles.

So how does a candidate assessment work? How much does it help? Where do you even start? Let’s dive into this blog and find answers to these questions.

What are Candidate Assessments?

Candidate assessment is one of the best ways for employers to identify and validate their top candidates, paving the path for an informed hiring decision. It refers to the process of evaluating job applicants to determine their suitability for a particular role within an organization. This evaluation typically involves assessing the candidate's skills, experience, qualifications, and overall fit with the company culture.

Candidate assessment helps you quickly identify the most qualified candidates for those empty seats by evaluating factors such as relevant work experience, educational background, and technical skills, you can ensure that you are selecting candidates who have the necessary capabilities to excel in the role. Goes without saying that it reduces the likelihood of hiring mismatches that can result in turnover and declining productivity.

How Recruiters Can Use Candidate Assessments in the Hiring Process

Hiring an employee is a major financial commitment that can cost organizations up to three times the annual salary of their chosen candidate. So, safe to say that candidate assessment is a tool that can help reduce time, effort, and capital in finding the right talent.

There are many candidate assessment tools to choose from. For example, you can leverage some Applicant Tracking System that comes with a candidate evaluation feature to make sure you pick the right talent for the job. Aside from automation capability and AI-driven features that can help fast-track and smoothen your hiring pipeline, Manatal’s ATS is also integrated with Codility, a technical skills assessment platform. Within Manatal, you can use Codility, send your candidates tests, and wait for the results in real-time.

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Now that we know what kind of tool can help you with candidate assessment, let’s see how you can implement it in the hiring process.

1. Saving time and resources

Instead of sifting through a large pool of resumes and conducting multiple rounds of interviews, you can use candidate assessments to quickly evaluate candidate skills, knowledge, and personality traits. This can help you identify top candidates more efficiently and allocate your resources towards only the most promising applicants.

2. Identifying the right candidates

By using assessments that are tailored to the specific job requirements, you can gain insights into a candidate's ability to perform key tasks, work well in a team, and fit with the company culture. You’ll be able to make more informed decisions and select candidates who are likely to succeed in the role in the long term.

3. Improving candidate experience

Use assessments that are engaging, interactive, and relevant to the job role. This way, you can provide candidates with a positive experience that reflects well on your company. It also helps attract top talent to your front door and strengthen your brand as a desired employer in the eyes of job seekers out there.

4. Reducing bias in hiring

You can make a fair game by using assessments that focus on objective criteria and job-related competencies. This will eliminate biased decisions from the evaluation process. Remember, making hiring decisions that are based on merit and qualifications rather than subjective factors will lead to a more diverse and inclusive workforce.

Types of Candidate Assessment

With the world at our fingertips these days, there is an abundance of candidate assessments to choose from. While they all serve a purpose in recruitment and strategy building, it is important to consider which specific assessment fits your particular needs best. Here are some candidate assessment types that can help you identify the right talent right from the early stages.

Skill Assessments

Knowing what a candidate is capable of and whether they have the necessary abilities for the role at hand is one of the key elements in recruitment. This is why skill assessments sit at the top of the list. These assessments can come in various forms - from multiple choice questions & true or false statements to writing samples & project plans. Assessing skills objectively with quantifiable data often ensures that you make well-informed decisions when it comes to hiring your next great team member.

There are different skill assessments that can be implemented depending on what you are trying to evaluate. Here are some examples.

• Work sample assessment: This assessment is designed to simulate certain tasks that a new hire is expected to perform in their job. It can be writing assignments, compiling a working code, or a presentation. By having them do this type of assessment, you can predict a candidate’s potential for performance.
• Cognitive ability assessment: Designed to measure an individual's reasoning, problem-solving, and decision-making abilities, it includes verbal and numerical reasoning, inductive/deductive reasoning, and spatial awareness.

Behavioral Assessments

If you are looking to determine if a candidate can work well with others, how they would react to stressful situations, and if there is a hidden talent that can be used to improve them and your organization, then you need to consider using a behavioral assessment.

These assessments are similar to a work sample test but with a focus on evaluating the candidate's behavior and decision-making in a simulated work environment. They can help you identify individuals who possess the right personality, work ethic, and behavioral traits to thrive in the role and contribute to the organization's success.

These assessments can take on various formats - from multiple choice questions and open-ended questionnaires to video answers, the options are plenty:

• Behavioral Interviews: In this type of assessment, the interviewer asks the candidate questions about how they have behaved in past work situations, to gain insight into their behavior patterns and decision-making style.
• Situational Judgment Tests (SJTs): These assess an individual's behavior and decision-making in simulated work-related scenarios, to determine their suitability for the role. SJTs typically present the candidate with a hypothetical situation and ask them to choose the best course of action from a set of options.
• Job Simulation Tests: These involve giving the candidate a job-related task to complete, either on-site or off-site, to evaluate their skills, abilities, and approach to work.

Personality Assessments

Often confused with behavioral assessments, personality assessments are, in fact, completely different. They are a type of evaluation method that allows you to screen candidates and determine their personality fit (or add) to the team, and to the organization as a whole.

There are several types of personality assessments, including:

• Standard Personality Tests: These are standardized, self-reported assessments that evaluate an individual's personality traits, such as extroversion, openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and neuroticism. The most common standard personality tests include the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and the Big Five Personality Traits.
• Projective Tests: These are less structured assessments that involve presenting the candidate with ambiguous stimuli, such as a picture or a statement, and asking them to interpret or respond to it. Projective tests aim to assess an individual's unconscious motivations and personality traits.
• Self-Assessments: These are assessments that the candidate completes on their own, either online or in print, to evaluate their own personality traits and behavior patterns. Self-assessments can be either standardized or custom-designed by the organization.

Conclusion

There are many good candidates out there that have the right certification, qualifications, and skills. So, you need tools to evaluate them objectively in order to determine if they are a perfect fit for a role. You want to do this at the early stage of the hiring process because when you realize that a candidate is not suitable for a job, you need to repeat the whole process, which is perhaps the last thing any recruiter would want.

By using candidate assessment, you can gain a more comprehensive understanding of a candidate's suitability for the role, beyond their technical skills and qualifications, and make informed hiring decisions that support their long-term success.

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Citations:

1. LinkedIn