How can skills assessment make a difference to your hiring process?

What is a skills assessment?

When companies hire, they strive to recruit candidates who have the professional qualification, work experience, skills and personality traits suitable for the job. Adding high quality candidates who are confident about what they can do is imperative for an organisation’s success. While professional qualifications and work experience can be verified by conducting background checks, analysing skills and matching them with job requirements is not an easy task. Corporate recruiters do not have the time to conduct skill tests that may take weeks or months to produce results. This is where online skill assessment tests make a difference.

Types of skills assessment

The following skill assessment tests can be customised and used for basic, intermediate, advanced, or expert level hiring.

Psychometric testing: Having an understanding about a candidate’s personality before hiring them is crucial for avoiding mis-hires. Psychometric testing helps to reveal not just the good but also dark personality traits that are difficult to detect. Traits such as temperamental behaviour, impulsiveness, insensitivity can be detrimental to the smooth functioning of teams. Scientific psychometric tests can assist you in prior identification of such traits and also job role-personality, and cultural fit of a candidate.

Personality testing: Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire (16PF), NEO Personality Inventory test etc., are some of the top tests used to assess a job seeker’s personality traits. The test is used to identify attitudes, social traits, strengths and weaknesses, motivations and other traits which play a crucial role in determining if the individual’s personality will match with the organisation’s culture and teamwork abilities.

Leadership assessments: This test is widely used mainly for lateral hiring conducted for senior management roles. The test enables you to analyse if a potential candidate can delegate work and be respectfully assertive in getting the work done. The top skills assessed during this test are delegation, problem solving ability, emotional intelligence, communication, motivation, and innovation.

General mental ability tests: A quick way to understand the general thinking and interpretation skills of a candidate is by using a mental ability test. Most of these aptitude tests are structured but they can also be customised to evaluate confidence, stress resilience, assertiveness, and creativity.

When to use skills assessment test

A number of technical skills and soft skills go into a job well done. Online skill assessment must be used if an employer wants to evaluate a potential candidate’s knowledge, expertise, productivity, and professional potential. Assessment tools are also rapidly being used by the HR to identify skill gaps in the workforce and to organise customised training programs.

Learning and development: Skills assessment test solutions help recruiters discover high potential employees with a better chance of performing well in their role. L&D teams use the reports generated from skill-based tests to design programs that improve skill sets.

Quick adoption of new skills: With new technology coming to the market every other day, companies need to prepare their workforce to meet new demands from their clients. Skill assessment test help to identify resources who can quickly learn a new skill thanks to prior knowledge or experience.

Upskill and reskill: Promote career growth by providing training avenues for employees to reskill or upskill. A prior assessment can help them have clarity about their current skill levels and with this knowledge they can make informed decisions regarding their reskill or upskill needs.

Benefits of skills assessment

How do you create a workforce of people who use their cognitive and mental abilities to work together and bring success to the organisation? Online skill assessments that consist of a wide range of well researched questions help discover exactly that. By analysing the answers to these questions, recruiters can find the right-fit candidates who are well suited for the job and the company culture. Some of the key benefits offered by online skill assessment platforms are:

Automated testing and result delivery for zero bias during hiring
High quality training and development programs
Better employee engagement and retention
Performance benchmarking that leads to higher productivity

Best skill assessment test platforms from MeritTrac

MeritTrac offers highly adaptive assessment platforms for designing skill tests based on job role requirement. The test content is created by experienced subject matter experts, statisticians, and psychometricians. The following MeritTrac platforms with easy-to-use interface, in-built analytics, and plug-and-play features are perfect for setting up tests during any stage of the employee life cycle.

- Pariksha: An adaptive and cloud ready assessment platform that allows creating and scheduling tests and also delivers results.

CodeTrac: A domain-based skill assessment platform with extensive programming language library and the option to create customised project-based coding scenarios to evaluate coders’ full-stack software development capabilities.