Are you aware that a bad hire can cost up to 5 times the hire’s annual salary?
If that’s not bad enough, you will incur additional costs in finding a replacement.
Why does this happen? Why do employers often hire the opposite of what they seek in a candidate?
Perhaps, this is why organizations are cautious in deciding who to hire but do such deliberations lead to fruitful hiring decisions? Absolutely not! When scouting for and recruiting a star candidate, one must make a data-backed judgment, not based on cognitive biases that influence the hiring decision. The latter will only provide a unidimensional view, leading to wrong hiring, snowballing into organization-wide challenges and inefficiencies.
So how does one evaluate and identify potential candidates? How does one negate the element of surprises that comes with bad hires? The answer is simple: talent assessment tools.
Talent assessment tools help employers identify candidates with high mental aptitude, good behavioral traits and innovative thinking abilities. This candidate mapping tool aids small and large organizations in finding right-fit candidates whose skills and talents match the job description.
Resumes don’t reveal the entire story, why a holistic hiring assessment tool is handy in enhancing the hiring procedure and making recruitment inexpensive, fair, prompt and result-driven.
Subsequently, “these assessments can be used for a wide variety of roles from the C-suite, and the entry-level to across the organization. One can create assessments for almost any profile or role,” says Michael Trust, an HR consultant.
But predicting a candidate’s abilities and compatibility swiftly isn’t the only advantage that a recruitment test proffers. There is much more to this process than what meets the eye.
Talent acquisition initiatives primarily enable carrying out the pre-employment screening efficiently and effectively. Besides, these initiatives are centered on finding candidates with adequate skills who align perfectly with company culture for a mutually beneficial proposition.
Candidate assessment tools are beneficial in streamlining the evaluation process of job seekers, significantly reducing the time needed to hire. These tools are a great way to assess candidates’ skills, culture fit, technical and cognitive skills. In addition, there are several other reasons to leverage candidate screening tools in your hiring efforts. We have listed some of them below:
HR professionals and hiring managers can better understand who is deemed fit for the job in question by assessing their skills. When they conduct any hiring process considering specific skills, they get a holistic overview of the candidates’ competencies – not just their resumes. So, these hiring assessment tools can help determine which candidates have the necessary skills for a role and bring them to the fore during interviews, helping recruiters save significant time in the process.
An objective, standardized talent assessment tool will ensure that recruiters make the right hiring decisions.
Talent assessment tools are instrumental in defining if someone has the required skills, but there is more to it. These tools can also help the hiring managers predict the likelihood of their candidates’ cultural fitment, which is significant considering if they are a good cultural fit, they will presumably be more successful in their roles and more likely to continue with the company longer.
Talent assessment tools are equally beneficial in analyzing the underlying behavioral traits. How do they undertake a task? What propels them to perform to their best? Understanding such critical information will always come in handy while making onboarding decisions.
Data-driven recruitment assessment tools can provide deep insights into a candidate’s skills, abilities and characteristics, enabling an objective screening, translating into a more productive and competent workforce. In addition, a torrent of data can offer rich insights into whether a candidate will fit in the organizational framework.
No matter the purpose of your new talent assessment tool, the results are rewarding. These tools offer some notable advantages when implemented correctly. Here are some that are difficult to ignore.
Let’s explore them in detail:
The right recruitment assessment tool reduces the time-to-hire by cutting short arduous processes and minimizing the strain on a company’s revenue and productivity, which results from leaving critical roles vacant for extended durations. Efficient evaluation at scale enables a company to drastically reduce the time and costs associated with hiring, to hire the best at the earliest, also reducing its turnover.
A bid to hire the best talent has made it more challenging for HR professionals to find the right fit. Despite spending considerably more time than they’d like to on shortlisting the right candidate, they make hiring mistakes. Well, not anymore. Hiring tests are a reasonably effective recruitment assessment tool that offers an accurate overview of the applicants’ performance and potential. This enables a swifter shortlisting of suitable candidates, improving the quality of hire.
A globally competitive marketplace mandates a near-instant result in organizational endeavors, which holds equally for workplace hiring. ‘Instant’ is what makes the most sense, why we often blame bad results on slow decisions. However, employing talent assessment tools results in quite the opposite. The ability to holistically and instantaneously assess candidates’ skills and expertise upon completion, with evidence-backed data, ensures employers can dive into their decisions head-first.
When candidates are assessed by hiring managers with limited development knowledge, they invariably, albeit unknowingly, select candidates based on favorable interactions, shared interests, assumptions or peer approval. This prevents organizations from identifying and hiring the best candidate for the job. However, hiring assessment tools offer validated metrics, helping shortlist and evaluate candidates fairly, without worrying about repercussions or subconscious prejudice. Accurate and in-depth insights objectively determine candidates’ profiles and compatibility with their roles, teams and organizational culture.
When companies utilize candidate assessment tools, they are exposed to every macro and micro strength and vulnerability of a candidate, including a glimpse of their untapped potential. It tells them where a viable candidate falls in terms of the experience level and the training they’ll need to succeed. If hiring such candidates, companies can hone certain qualities to meet, if not exceed, business demands. They can design training modules for high-quality workforce development, initiate functional cross-disciplinary training, re-skill, upskill or mentor to enhance existing capabilities.
Talent assessment tests in recruitment are fairer and swifter, often attracting positive responses from candidates and peers, leading to more significant connections. They strengthen the organization. Concurrently, a better understanding of the internally available talent also helps a company maintain its competitive advantage in fulfilling its talent needs. This helps the organization shuffle key roles internally when needed while retaining its reputation, expanding the business, and enhancing productivity and profit margins.
Talent assessments can be conducted in both online and offline environments, depending on the recruiter’s recruitment assessment method best suited for the specific job role, type and convenience.
For example, if a talent acquisition expert seeks to hire coders in the IT domain, he/she can select the best talent using the online coding simulator. It’s a recruitment assessment tool used by coders to write codes in real-time within a coding environment. First, the applicant is evaluated on parameters, such as problem-solving skills, performance on the desired task and coding proficiency in general programming languages. Then, once the candidates complete coding, they are auto-graded in real-time based on the code quality, efficiency, correctness and scalability.
Similarly, if a recruiter seeks to employ a sales representative, they will ask the applicant to perform the activity in real-time to evaluate on-the-job skills. An interview can also be conducted as a group discussion to assess the candidate’s communication and convincing skills. This is ideally an offline mode of behavioral assessment.
Now that you’ve explored the nuances of talent assessments, you must select the right assessment tool for your organization.
But which is the best assessment tool? The market is replete with numerous recruitment assessment providers. And companies are competing to choose the best talent assessment tool. Hence, you should find the best match for the job and the organization.
Let’s explore them in detail:
Mettl was founded in 2010 and is one of the world’s largest online assessment platforms, offering all major assessment tools for Hiring and L&D.
It is a skill assessment platform that uses AI-powered technology to evaluate candidates’ cognitive abilities, skills, personality traits, emotional intelligence and behavioral traits.
The company’s hiring platform automates candidate screening and interviewing and makes it easy for recruiters to hire talent as they have access to reliable candidate insights and predictable scoring.
They measure the four critical aspects of human personality and assess whether the applicant is a good match for a specific job requirement. The four key elements of human personality are positive personality traits, dark personality traits, motivations, values, preferences and cognitive abilities.
They assess an applicant’s critical thinking ability, verbal reasoning, numerical ability, problem-solving skills, etc., to execute a particular task, depending on the job function and type.
These tests measure a candidate's human behavior and the course of action in a given organizational situation. A recruiter measures an individual’s behavioral competencies, such as skills, knowledge and personality traits.
They analyze an applicant’s knowledge in specific domains, such as IT, accounts, sales, HR, marketing and operations, etc.
A coding assessment evaluates the candidate’s ability to write a code. Mercer | Mettl offers customized coding assessments for applicants to choose ready-made tests from a comprehensive test library. A coder can take the assessment in a risk-free, secure and proctored coding environment.
They evaluate a candidate’s verbal skills, such as pronunciation, fluency, grammar and listening comprehension for job roles, such as BPO, sales and marketing, etc.
Mercer | Mettl also offers online proctoring with AI-powered tools to conduct secure virtual assessments. The AI and human-based proctoring monitors candidates’ behavior and actions for suspicious activities.
It is a skill assessment platform that is used to recruit candidates for software-specific roles, such as qualified developers and engineers. This recruitment assessment tool is suitable only for the first round of technical interviews.
It offers various assessments, such as cognitive ability, personality tests, coding tests, sales ability tests, customer service and job skills tests. Recruiters can make smart hiring decisions and pool in skilled and qualified candidates with a host of selection assessment methods.
It is a technical recruitment platform that helps talent acquisition experts conduct online technical interviews.
Founded in 2009, it is a technology hiring platform that assesses developer skills for over 2,000+ companies globally and helps companies use coding assessments in over 35 programming languages. Let’s look at some of its offerings:
It is a comprehensive and robust platform that offers a portfolio of assessments for a holistic overview of a candidate’s potential.
It is a comprehensive assessment platform that offers over 1,000 skill tests for coding, enterprise resource planning, finance, languages, manufacturing and retail, among others.
It’s the Swiss-army knife of online skills assessments. This recruitment analysis tool offers customized assessments for specific job roles such as HR, sales, administration, IT and accounting.
Founded in 2005, Cappfinity is a global leader in strengths-based assessment, providing recruitment and development solutions to forward-thinking companies.
It is a platform that enables recruiters to customize programming tests for any coding language or technology and helps create customized assessments.
The online assessment platform has a list of tests for candidates, such as general tests, including numerical, verbal reasoning, abstract reasoning, English comprehension, project management. It also evaluates candidates’ codes and answers, helping hiring experts make better decisions.
Hiring experts can rely on Thrivemap to recruit a large volume of people for the same type of role.
HR Avatar helps employers hire the best possible employees. They administer online pre-employment selection tests, automated reference checks, and video interviews to job candidates and provide detailed reports to recruiters and hiring managers.
It is an online skills assessment software that helps recruiters measure an applicant’s skills, knowledge and personality traits.
It is an English online assessment platform that offers ready-made or fully customized tests for recruitment, in-house audits and pre-and post-training. The platform evaluates candidates’ oral and written English competency.You can also use English assessments for candidate recruitment, training assessments, mobility/internal audits, call centers, admission and IT recruiting.
Harver is a New York-based startup that provides volume recruitment solutions, enabling companies to hire digitally at scale.
Founded in 1987, Hogan is grounded in more than three decades of validated research that offers personality assessment and leadership development.
HireMojo is a subscription-based hiring automation platform. The system helps you fill jobs across your company faster, more conveniently and at reduced costs.
Hirevue is a video interviewing and assessment software provider that helps global enterprises to streamline hiring processes in the modern talent marketplace. It has simplified the way companies discover and hire talent and is available in over 30 languages.
All this information can be overwhelming. Hence, a word of caution- be extremely particular when shortlisting a hiring assessment company or a recruitment test provider. A holistic recruitment test provider will finetune its solutions by matching them to your hiring process’s requirements. Hence, the absence of any feature that doesn’t lead you to your end-game will steer you away from proper evaluation and ideal hiring. Consequently, it also means employing an irrelevant recruitment and assessment service provider.
Are you still confused? Don’t worry. We have you covered with some information that’ll help you swiftly shortlist your ideal hiring test service provider.
A talented and skilled workforce is a prerequisite for any organization. Therefore, companies invest enormous resources, financial and otherwise, in onboarding the best workforce. Organizations want to hire top talent. Therefore, talent acquisition experts are revamping their hiring strategies on a large scale to recruit skilled and qualified candidates.
There is a high demand for talent assessment tools among businesses of various sizes as they help recruiters analyze employees’ skills, aptitude, knowledge, hidden talents and training needs. In addition, these tools assist hiring experts in employing talented individuals.
Now that we’ve shortlisted our service providers based on hiring requirements, it is time to move to the next part, which involves understanding the types of talent assessment tools.
Mark Webster, Co-founder of Authority Hacker,ensures all applicants go through a cognitive and personality testing service across all roles during the recruitment process. He says, “These tests are about checking for a strong level of engagement and understanding of the job.”
Types of Recruitment Assessment Tests include:
Psychometric assessment is a standard and scientific method that analyzes a candidate’s personality traits and mental abilities. This recruitment assessment tool gauges an individual’s ability to perform the task effectively and efficiently.
Psychometric assessment is derived from personality and behavior. ‘Personality’ is what we are, while ‘behavior’ is all about actions. Hence, psychometric tests measure the 4 key aspects of human personality. They are listed below:
Five factors involved in the psychometric testing tool are shown below:
This recruitment test type pinpoints the exact traits needed for the job while significantly enhancing the selection and engagement experiences. You can deep-dive into different types of psychometric assessments here. They offer valuable insights to talent acquisition experts.
CP Plus is a leading tech-security solutions provider that offers a comprehensive range of advanced security and surveillance solutions. Despite its formidable presence in the electronic surveillance products segment, the company was facing several challenges in growing and expanding its business. It was hard-pressed to find a dynamic sales team to further its mandate.
Some of its challenges were:
Click Here To Read The Entire Case Study
How Mercer | Mettl Addressed the Problem
Impact
A behavioral assessment helps recruiters understand a candidate’s behavior in a simulated work environment. The applicants must demonstrate behavior competencies in one or more activities relevant to their job role and resemble an actual organizational situation.
Applicants are presented with realistic work scenarios with possible actions to gauge candidate behavior. Then, they have to select either the best option or rank the possible actions based on their effectiveness.
Behavioral assessments are essential candidate mapping tools to find the right fit for the job role. A behavioral tool brings clarity to how people behave at work. Hence, they combine innovation and scientific rigor to assess role fitment. As a result, recruiters can make informed decisions about the organization’s future leaders.
There are different types of behavior evaluation tools that are often used together to assess the role-fitment. The explanation for each behavioral tool is exhibited in the table below:
Source: https://blog.mettl.com/guide/behavioral-assessment-test/
These tools are engaging ways to choose the right people for the right jobs and are often customized to emulate the organizational setting and the role’s challenges.
A pharmaceutical behemoth that discovers, develops, and markets various healthcare therapies to customers was hiring extensively. However, given the large volumes of candidate evaluations, the company struggled to find a competency framework with the right mix of aptitude and behavioral assessments.
Mercer | Mettl’s team carried out an in-depth exercise to understand the key competencies required across different roles and levels. The team analyzed comprehensively to curate the right assessments and benchmarked them to identify relevant candidates. The reports were customized to address the key business needs and identify suitable candidates. Besides, Mercer | Mettl conducted the entire recruitment cycle on the organization’s career portal, ensuring a seamless experience for candidates and the company.
Impact
Click Here to read the detailed case study on behavioral assessments.
Cognitive assessments measure a candidate’s thinking abilities, such as perception, reasoning, memory, verbal skills and problem-solving skills. These assessments are designed to challenge the applicant’s ability to pay attention, visualize, recognize, organize and their potential to solve problems when learning new job skills or tackling workplace issues.
Measuring cognitive intelligence
Cognitive tests assess critical thinking and reasoning logic related to on-the-job performance. The test measures two intelligent types- crystallized intelligence and fluid intelligence through a series of complex questions.
Technical assessments evaluate an applicant’s functional and subject knowledge for a specific job role. The questions in technical tests are based on the skill requirement of a specific job role. The competencies in technical assessment vary with the job function, job role and industry. This test enables recruiters to filter stellar technical talent from a vast candidate pool, using a combination of application-based questions, such as MCQs and simulators.
Coding assessments measure applicants’ know-how and evaluate them on languages and technologies, such as Java, Python, C++, Oracle, SQL, etc. A hiring manager filters quality technical talent from a vast candidate pool by using a combination of knowledge and application-based techniques, such as MCQs and simulators.
Besides, coding assessments measure the candidate’s ability to fulfill the essential criteria and job requirements. A meaningful talent evaluation from the beginning ensures the ensuing steps enable successful hiring. Hence, coding assessments are best suited before the interview round and should be administered as part of technical screening.
Before hiring new team members, Peter Schoeman, Founder/CEO of The Dog Adventure, considers applying a selection assessment method. For instance, he takes a writing test to gauge heavy work in communications or encourages an IT superstar to complete an independent project for the company. He states, “these skills assessments save you a lot of difficulties on the line by demonstrating, beyond any doubt, that your stellar candidate has the skills and talent necessary to succeed.”
Indus Valley Partners, a leading technology solution and consulting service provider in the global asset management industry, sought talented coders. However, it didn’t have the assessment tools to undertake an efficient, easy and accurate evaluation process.
Indus Valley Partners employed Mercer | Mettl’s online assessment platform, using coding assessments to test candidates’ coding abilities, down to the code efficiency level. They were evaluated on concepts such as recursion, AI Stacks, etc., to onboard the best developers.
Recruiters were able to automate and scale up the screening process via technical assessments. The candidates’ coding potential was assessed accurately using Mercer | Mettl’s coding simulator.
Impact
A spoken English assessment measures a candidate’s pronunciation, fluency, grammar and listening comprehension. It also assesses the applicant’s cultural fitment and domain knowledge.
Good communication skills are significant for success in the globally interlinked economy. Therefore, hiring experts seek candidates who can effectively communicate in English and maximize business collaborations. Hence, this recruitment testing method is the best filtration tool to assess applicants applying for customer-facing roles and industries such as sales, BPO, hospitality, media house and branding, etc.
Talent acquisition experts can also assess candidates through application/situation-based tests. Such assessments enable recruiters to predict the applicant’s on-the-job mental ability, behavior pattern, course of action, and decision-making in performing real-time tasks.
Here’s how one can assess an applicant’s competency:
A job simulator is a pre-employment test where candidates perform the tasks in real-time. A recruiter assesses candidates on organizational situations performed on the job. For example, a sales representative can be asked to deal with customers and resolve their issues over a chat. A hypothetical scenario can test their analytical and logical thinking skills. Such a talent mapping assessment is similar to a work sample. However, the former involves more on-the-spot work.
For example: Using coding simulators to assess the proficiency of technical candidates.
Coding assessment analyzes a technical candidate’s hands-on experience and the ability to solve a problem in their desired programming language. Talent acquisition experts assess the coders on code quality, efficiency, correctness and scalability, etc. An online programming test can be conducted on a coding test platform to evaluate the candidate’s test cases of your choice and the code’s effectiveness.
The third type of online assessment test used by talent acquisition experts is- 360-degree assessment. Here, HR seeks feedback from multiple stakeholders such as the employee’s superiors, peers, direct reports, and even clients to understand their perception regarding the employee’s readiness to take on a specific role.
It is also a feedback mechanism that helps employees gain an improved perspective on performance, skill levels and behavior as perceived by others.
A 360-degree evaluation is an additional metric used to determine the right fit, and those multiple perspectives are factored in when making the final decision.
Mercer | Mettl’s online platform helps recruiters and companies to make significant people decisions with a comprehensive suite of tools for talent assessment and recruiting solutions. Evaluating a large number of candidates across various domains is not easy for hiring experts. A thorough, well-researched and analytics-led approach is pivotal, and that’s where Mercer | Mettl’s talent assessment methods are extremely useful.
Some of the popular talent assessment tools offered by Mercer | Mettl are listed below in the figure:
Here are some frequently asked questions on recruitment tests online, recruitment test meaning, recruitment assessment test examples to help you understand recruitment tests better.
That’s the long and short of it. This is our complete guidebook on talent assessment tools.
We believe that this handy piece offered you clarity and assuaged your concerns, preparing you to confidently embrace the value of hiring tools.
Now let’s turn it over to you.
What did you think about this guide? What made you take to talent testing tools?
Is there something you’d like us to include? Let us know by leaving a comment below, and we will surely add them.
Originally published October 12 2020, Updated August 11 2021
Shirisha has been helping countless brands gain traction with her content. Her deep understanding of the education sector and sound knowledge of technical skills have helped her structure the most creative solutions for key stakeholders. Shirisha has also ghosted pieces for several industry honcho’s successfully published both online and offline. When she's not keeping up with the world, you're sure to find her catching up on bollywood stories or gramming for fun.
Talent assessment is a structured process employers use to identify the most suitable job candidates. This test may comprise various questions, job simulations, etc., that employers can use to assess an applicant’s performance and competency for a particular role.
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Behavioral Competencies
Cognitive Competencies
Coding Competencies
Domain Competencies
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