Hiring Assessments 101

Finding the right candidate for your organization can be a daunting task. Implementing effective hiring assessments can streamline this process, ensure you select the best fit for your team, and drive team performance. 

Discover the various types of hiring assessments available, their benefits, best practices to maximize their impact, and how to measure their success. Whether you’re a seasoned HR professional or new to the field, understanding the role of hiring assessments is crucial in building a talented and diverse workforce.

Types of Hiring Assessments

1. Aptitude Testing

Aptitude tests help predict what a candidate’s natural abilities and skills are so you can assess if they’re suited for your open role.

2. Hard Skills Tests

Skills assessment tests measure the hard skills a candidate possesses, like grammar or technology proficiency. 

3. Soft Skill/Personality Assessments

Soft skills and personality assessments measure a candidates’ soft skills – like a preference for teamwork, ambition, or self-confidence.

Benefits of Hiring Assessments

1. Find Top Candidates Quickly

Pre-hire assessments evaluate candidates based on their actual abilities, rather than relying solely on their credentials. By assessing cognitive skills, personality traits, and job-specific competencies, you can gain valuable insights into a candidate’s fit.

2. Expand Your Talent Pool 

Stop missing out on top candidates because your hiring team is overly focused on experience or specific degrees instead of skills. Hiring assessments help you to find top candidates you might have otherwise overlooked.

3. Objectively Screening Candidates 

Screening candidates based on their skills, instead of their “cultural fit” or “connection” with their interviewers, brings objective criteria and structure to your hiring process.

4. Improve Hiring Equity 

Increased objectivity helps increase hiring equity, in turn increasing diversity, hiring speed, and your talent pool

5. Speed Up Hiring and Reduce HR Workload

Hiring assessments speed up time-to-hire and lighten the load on your hiring teams by surfacing the applicants who are likely the best fit for the role, allowing your recruiters to focus solely on top talent.

6. Increase Soft Skill Fit

Hiring for soft skills can increase your bottom line and enhance the productivity of your whole team. Soft skills assessments identify the skills that are difficult to train, but candidates need to succeed.

7. Enhance performance, retention and engagement

Using hiring assessments to identify candidates who possess the necessary skills and align with the company’s values improves retention rates, reduces turnover, and boosts team performance.

Hiring Assessment Best Practices

1. Perform soft skills tests first

When you have a wide range of diverse and potentially qualified candidates to narrow your talent pool.

2. Administer hard skills tests after 

Requiring a hard skills assessment test too early in the hiring process can eliminate candidates who would otherwise be well-suited for the role because of their soft skills.  

3. Customize based on role 

Customize your hiring assessments based on the role you’re to get more meaningful and helpful results.

4. Interpret data 

Any hiring test will tell you how candidates scored — but only more advanced hiring assessments will let you know what those results really mean so you can make a hiring decision based on a complete view of the candidate. 

5. Leverage data across the hiring process 

Use your hiring test results across multiple steps of the process, for example developing structured interview guides or personalizing onboarding.

How to Gauge Hiring Assessment Success

• Increased retention
  
• Decreased time-to-hire
  
• Decreased costs
  
• Increased candidate quality
  
• Closing skill gaps
  
• Improved DE&I

Incorporating hiring assessments into your recruitment process can significantly enhance your ability to identify and secure top talent. By leveraging these tools, you can improve hiring equity, reduce time-to-hire, and ultimately boost your organization’s performance and retention rates. Embrace the power of hiring assessments to transform your hiring strategy, to not only find the right candidates but also foster a more inclusive and effective workplace.

See how Cangrade’s pre-hire assessments can transform your hiring today. Request a demo.