You need applicants with specific qualifications to fill critical jobs. However, recruiting applicants has become challenging due to a global talent shortage. Companies’ needs have changed, but applicants’ skills have not kept pace. The result is a skills misalignment that is felt worldwide.
According to a ManpowerGroup Talent Shortage survey, 75% of companies have difficulty filling essential jobs. A Gartner survey shows that the time required to fill positions increased by 18% from 2020 to 2021.
Since speed, efficiency, and accuracy are priorities in hiring top talent, businesses constantly evaluate assessment methods for hiring, like the eSkill Talent Assessment PlatformTM. With an assessment solution, you can screen large volumes of applicants and identify the ones to shortlist. You can also improve the hiring experience for candidates, which helps attract top talent.
How The Best Hiring Assessments Improve the Candidate Experience
If you do a Google search, you will find articles that claim candidates are suspicious of pre-employment tests. You will also discover that businesses can leverage the benefits of top-notch hiring assessment methods to improve candidate experience during hiring. These are some ways.
- Reduce Unconscious Bias: Traditional hiring tools such as resumes and interviews are less objective than the best hiring assessments. Hiring teams might tend to ignore highly qualified candidates because they do not have a college degree or did not work for the “right” companies. Pre-employment tests minimize the chances of this happening because hiring team members make decisions based on hard data—applicants’ test scores. This means candidates are judged on what they can DO instead of who they ARE.
- Everyone Gets an Equal Chance: The best hiring assessments level the playing field and ensure all applicants receive equal consideration. Everyone takes the same test and answers the same questions in the same order, and hiring team members rate everyone using specific criteria. They have no direct interaction with candidates as they would during screening calls and unstructured interviews. So, there is no chance that they will unintentionally spend more time with one candidate over others.
- Reduce Time-to-Hire: One of the biggest complaints candidates have about companies’ hiring processes is it takes too long to get a response. This is because HR teams must spend hours reviewing resumes and conducting interviews. There can also be second and even third interviews, which prolongs the process even more. The best hiring assessments alleviate these problems because recruiters can quickly screen hundreds of applicants, identify those who are qualified, and move them through the hiring process. Using assessment methods for hiring also eliminates the need for multiple interviews because the prime focus is on applicants’ skills, not on how they perform during face-to-face interviews.
- Shows Respect for Candidates’ Time: Candidates also complain that pre-employment skills tests are a waste of time because they cover skills irrelevant to the job they are applying for. Many get frustrated and leave before completing the application process. The best hiring assessment solutions, such as the eSkill Talent Assessment PlatformTM, allow you and your team to customize skills tests so all the questions pertain to the skills required for the job.
- Expands Your Talent Pool: When staffing firms use the best hiring assessments, they can uncover applicants with non-traditional backgrounds, whom they might have overlooked. For example, an applicant who is a self-taught Java programmer might be the perfect candidate for a web designer position, even without a college degree or IT work experience. If they get a top score on the Java Developer or Web Designer skills test, the company can decide to extend an offer because their skills test results show they could do the job, regardless of how they acquired the experience.
How To Implement Candidate-Focused Assessment Methods for Hiring
Businesses need to recruit top talent, and many are thinking outside the box to do so. As the following example shows, KPMG Jamaica used assessment methods for hiring to identify highly qualified candidates and build a talent pool.
KPMG Jamaica Extended Support Services (JESS) is a shared-services affiliate of KPMG Jamaica and a top audit, tax, and advisory firm. The company needed to attract candidates with the accounting and financial reasoning skills required for newly created accounting and financial positions. It was hard to attract top candidates, even after getting the word out on social media.
The hiring team developed the Accounting Challenge, a skills test with five critical reasoning, accounting, and financial questions, and posted the link on KPMG Jamaica’s Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter pages. Anyone who completed the test was entered into a drawing for an Amazon gift card, regardless of their score. Participants were encouraged to share the test with friends and followers, compare results, and challenge each other.
The login page collected each participant’s name and e-mail address, allowing recruiters to follow up with promising candidates. KPMG was expecting around 100 to 200 responses but received close to 1,000. This enabled them to recruit qualified candidates to fill the new positions and build a talent pool to fill other open positions.
Get Started with Pre-Employment Skills Testing
Implementing innovative assessment methods for hiring, like the eSkill Talent Assessment PlatformTM, will help you simplify recruiting, improve hiring outcomes, and provide a better experience for candidates.
Do you want to know how the best hiring assessments can help you improve hiring outcomes and candidate experience? Contact us to request a demo.
Sign up for our newsletter
