With how popular skills testing has become, it’s undoubtedly one of the most successful hiring practices out there. Many companies adopt this strategy to filter through candidates, find the best fit for the job, and hire efficiently each time. But what if we tell you that skills testing can bring even more potential for success when you assess more candidates?
That’s right. The more candidates you assess, the more talent you assess. In turn, this provides a foundation for even better hiring decisions. Tag along as we explain how this practice works and how you can apply it to your recruitment to go from good to great hiring efficiency.
The importance of comprehensive candidate evaluation
Candidate evaluation encompasses assessing whether or not a potential employee has all the required knowledge and skills to take up an open role. This is one of the most critical parts of recruitment, so it’s vital to carry it out with utmost care and attention to detail.
Comprehensive candidate evaluation ensures that the skills assessment process is thorough enough to spot talent among the applicants. This process could comprise customized application questions, skills testing, resume scanning, and structured interviews.
One main reason comprehensive candidate evaluation is essential is to avoid recruitment errors. Thorough skill assessment helps spotlight and uncover candidates with the skills needed to succeed in the open role. As such, it provides hiring managers with more insight about a candidate they need to find the perfect hire.
The data obtained from this process can help employers focus on those who are fit for the role, minimizing bias and boosting hiring efficiency. So, not only is comprehensive candidate evaluation beneficial, but it is also a must for companies who want to hire right.
Simply put, the more talent you assess, the greater your chances of hiring top-notch candidates. Testing a larger pool of potential employees not only gives you more options to choose from but also allows you to cast a wide net and locate a perfect fit for the role.
Here are some benefits of skill testing more candidates:
1. Increased diversity
Opening your skill assessment pool to more candidates gives you access to applications from people of different backgrounds, races, and identities. This makes it possible to identify and hire diverse candidates with varying ideas, perceptions, and auxiliary skills, boosting creativity among your workforce.
2. Improved quality of hires
Testing a larger candidate pool allows you to access candidates with more talent and proficiency levels. As such, you can compare the role’s requirements with the skills available to find and hire candidates who fit perfectly with their respective roles and would excel in your company.
3. Enhanced employer reputation
Evaluating more candidates during recruitment demonstrates your commitment to ensuring fairness and inclusivity. As a result, you can develop a reputation of openness and transparency within your industry. This encourages more talent to apply to your company during future hiring processes.
4. Reduced hiring bias
With more talent to choose from, you can collect even more data on available talent to implement a data-driven assessment that focuses primarily on candidate skills. This approach helps you eradicate hiring bias since you can make hiring decisions based solely on candidate performance.
Data-driven hiring: How skill testing enhances decision-making
As a hiring manager, relying solely on your gut feeling or a candidate’s unproven experience could lead to errors in your hiring. Plus, with how easily candidates can lie on their resumes, applying just resume screening isn’t the best option for effective recruitment.
Fortunately, skills testing solves this issue by laying the foundation for data-driven hiring. With skills testing, you can observe candidates applying their skills to solve challenges common to the open role. At the end of this process, you see which candidates performed best, thus narrowing the applicants to the best talent available.
Skills testing provides a highly accurate ranking of the candidates for a position and their performances across individual skill tests. Based on this data, you can make hiring decisions by identifying and hiring candidates with the necessary skills.
Overcoming bias: Leveraging skill testing for fair and objective selection
At first glance, the idea of assessing more candidates during the recruitment process sounds like a lot of work hectic. Fortunately, you can apply various measures to reduce the workload and ensure efficiency simultaneously.
In this section, we will discuss, step-by-step, how to leverage skills testing for fair and objective selection.
Step 1: Perform a job analysis
Before testing candidates’ skills, you must first understand what the open role requires. For this reason, a job analysis is super important. This procedure allows you to understand a job’s role in an organization and the skills the position would require to perform excellently.
To carry out a job analysis, you can either survey employees in similar roles, analyze other job postings for the same role, or utilize your company’s skills taxonomy. Whatever the means, you should have a detailed outline of the role’s requirements and duties.
Step 2: Draft a job description
Your job description is vital to recruitment because it is one of the first things the candidate sees related to the open role. As such, when drafting it, you must ensure it is clear and concise while providing the candidates with all the information they need about the open role.
In addition, the job description should perfectly portray your company’s image, including details like your logo, motto, or even mission.
Step 3: Administer a skills test
While you can administer your skill tests later in the recruitment process, it is always best to assess your candidates earlier because it enables you to focus on those with the required skill set for the role. This can help you save time, resources, and effort from evaluating numerous candidates only to find out they don’t have what it takes to obtain the position.
Although traditional skills testing methods involve physical assessments, online tools like Vervoe are more convenient, save time, and eradicate hiring bias. The system also helps you rank candidates according to their performance to quickly identify the best fit for the role based on available data.
Step 4: Carry out structured interviews
Unlike basic interview procedures, a structured interview gives you more direction and avoids errors. These interviews include prepared questions that evaluate the candidate’s personality, skills, culture fit, and knowledge of the open post.
After the interviews, you can grade each candidate and compare their performance with the results of your skills testing process and their resume experience to find those who actually possess the skills they claim.
Step 5: Make offers
Once you’ve compared the candidates and made your decisions, make an offer immediately. Before sending an offer, it’s always a good idea to find out what payment range candidates expect and compare that with the average salary for the role and your budget.
Consequently, when the candidate accepts your offer, you can onboard and train them to provide more insight about the position and your company.
Case studies: Examples of successful hiring through expanded skills testing
Skill testing more candidates is a practice that’s become widespread recently, especially with the introduction of virtual skills assessment. With this skills testing method, companies can evaluate up to thousands of candidates simultaneously and not have to compromise on the quality of their hires.
Let’s check out some success stories of companies who have implemented this strategy in their hiring.
TriNet
TriNet, one of the largest Professional Employer Organizations (PEOs), faced two major problems: effective scaling and improving the quality of its hires. While the company already had a recruitment method, it needed to open the top of its hiring funnel and assess more candidates to solve this problem. Thankfully, Vervoe helped TriNet achieve its goals within a short period.
With Vervoe, TriNet could assess more candidates, thus allowing them to reach more talent and find perfect hires for various roles. The best part was that the company could save time and hire top-notch talent within six months of virtual skills assessment with Vervoe.
KlientBoost
A top-performing marketing agency, KlientBoost, struggled with managing its growth due to a high demand in the online marketplace in 2020. To curb this, the company needed a new recruitment technique that would allow it to assess more candidates in ample time, and Vervoe provided the perfect platform for this.
With Vervoe, KlientBoost ranked the best-performing talent, thus simultaneously increasing its speed-to-hire and quality of hires.
Walmart
Walmart, a top retail company, battled with inefficient candidate assessment processes and low candidate experience. For this reason, assessing more candidates was no easy feat for the company. Luckily, Vervoe provided the perfect solution to both problems.
Using our skill assessment platform, Walmart could administer skills tests to candidates to validate their skills and evaluate multiple candidates simultaneously. This helped them implement high-volume testing, boost candidate experience, and hire the perfect fit for the job each time.
Tell your success story next with Vervoe
While skill testing more candidates has numerous benefits, you might not access its full potential without the right testing platform. The good news is that Vervoe can help you achieve this goal and take your hiring up several notches.
Vervoe is an online skill assessment tool that allows you to test candidates’ skills using pre-designed and customizable assessments. This platform uses intricate questions based on real-life scenarios and job simulations to measure candidates’ performances. Then, it ranks them so you can see the best candidate and make informed hiring decisions.
Ultimately, the power to transform your hiring lies in your hands. Switch from basic skill testing to comprehensive candidate evaluation today with Vervoe. Simply schedule a demo with us to get started!
