Future of hiring: Job simulation or skills assessment

Hiring top talent has become challenging because, today, recruiters receive thousands of applications for one job profile. When hiring managers complete candidate shortlisting, screening, and evaluation phases manually, they spend multiple hours sorting through applicants, finding relevant key skills in resumes, and interviewing top talent.

Using relevant job simulations or job skills assessment tests helps recruiters streamline hiring processes. These assessments are designed to match specific job roles, helping identify talent that culturally and technically fits the job role.

However, many recruiters confuse job simulation with job skills assessment tests. While job simulation is a sub-category in job skills tests, both have functional differences. It is essential to evaluate which type of assessment suits the organization’s hiring needs.

A job simulation assessment is a type of skills test that evaluates candidates on the domain-specific job profile. It creates a suitable working environment to test candidates’ hands-on experience and knowledge. For example, Mercer | Mettl’s Codelysis is a leading AI-based integrated development environment (IDE) that automatically generates results using multiple parameters like plagiarism, code playback, and a custom scoring mechanism.

A skills assessment test for employment evaluates candidates based on relevant on-the-job interpersonal and strategic skills. For example, Mercer | Mettl’s pre-employment tests evaluate candidates on multiple traits like personality, behavior, aptitude intelligence, domain skills, communications, and many more.

When hiring managers need to onboard employees based on their core competencies rather than generic skills, they should use job simulation assessments to replicate the working environment. If job requirements include multiple competencies or involve hiring freshers, job skills assessment tests help evaluate candidates’ overall knowledge.

It is challenging to find quality tech talent in an exhaustive hiring market. For one job application, thousands of candidates apply, many with relevant job skills. Using the right recruitment tools at this stage helps shortlist top talent for future hiring stages.

Therefore, job skills assessment helps gauge candidates’ comprehensive job fitment. These assessments may not reveal in-depth knowledge of core skills. However, they help evaluate collaboration skills, problem-solving, strategic and critical thinking, and leadership qualities. It helps approach candidates based on their soft skills and technical knowledge.

Key factors that a skills assessment cover

Skills assessment covers many job-related tests, such as domain knowledge and pre-employment assessments. All these integrate to evaluate candidates’ core competencies, leadership, teamwork, and job fitment.

Key factors that make skills assessment valuable for companies:

• High-quality questions: Skills assessment should contain high-quality questions in multiple formats, such as caselets, situational questions, coding questions, etc. A blend of different question types evaluates candidates’ performance on the job.
• Question relevancy: Any employee on the same job profile should be able to answer these questions without challenges. Therefore, questions should help recruiters measure candidates’ key competencies and performance metrics.
• Customized for job skills: Questions in a skills assessment should be tailored to job responsibilities, keeping applicants’ backgrounds and experiences in mind. A candidate with one year of experience may not have similar cognitive and behavioral intelligence as a candidate with ten years of experience.

Authentic job simulation offers an immersive experience to candidates. Any candidate taking a test via job simulation may experience a real-world job environment. These authentic experiences mimic real-world roles and responsibilities that employees perform.

Hence, when searching for suitable tech talent, recruiters can use a coding simulator to shortlist top candidates. These simulators use IDEs similar to real testing and coding environments.

Four benefits of job simulation in tech hiring

Mercer | Mettl’s coding simulator replicates real-world IDE and evaluates candidates automatically on key coding skills. It uses various parameters to find technical fit candidates, which are:

Which phase of hiring should include job simulation and skills assessment?

Job simulations and skills assessment tests should be incorporated in earlier hiring stages. Including pre-employment tests, coding skills tests, or other job simulations in the early recruitment phases help reduce costs, improve time to hire, and eliminate chances of wrong hires. These tests identify applicants who don’t match job requirements, reducing the pool of qualified candidates in the final hiring stages. As a result, recruiters only interview skilled candidates in the final stages to gauge cultural fitment.

Job simulation and job skills assessment tests are both essential in different roles and recruitment stages. While a job simulation helps gauge candidates in a real-world environment, skills assessment allows an understanding of candidates’ transferable and on-the-job skills. Therefore, hiring managers should create a plan incorporating both tests at relevant stages of recruitment to hire top talent and reduce time and money spent on wrong hires.