Steps to Automate Online Talent Assessment for your Recruitment Process

Identifying the right candidate fit for a given job position is a challenging task for recruiters and HR teams. Regardless of the effort, it is difficult to understand the skills and the ability to perform day to day responsibilities of a job just based on the CV or during an interview. This is why online candidate skill assessment is reshaping the recruitment landscape.

With increasing hiring volumes and evolving requirements recruiters across industries are constantly on the lookout for ways to simplify several human resource-intensive steps in talent acquisition. Development of technology enables automation of most of the steps in a talent acquisition process.

In this write-up we are going to discuss the automation of candidate skill assessment as it is one of the most critical components in the recruitment process. It is going to determine the quality, suitability, and the cultural fit of an organization’s future employees. Therefore, creating and optimizing a seamless talent assessment method becomes crucial.

A typical talent acquisition process consists of the below-mentioned stages:

• Writing a job description
• Creating a job post and promoting
• Candidate sourcing
• Candidate CV screening
• Talent assessment tests
• Scheduling and conducting interview
• Candidate filtration and selection process

Benefits of automating online talent assessment in your recruitment pipeline

1. It enables virtual recruitment which is a long-term scalable solution.
2. It promotes increased candidate engagement, diversity, equity, and inclusion.
3. It can reduce the time taken for candidate sourcing, screening, and evaluations.
4. It can lessen expenses of travel and movement.
5. It can minimize unnecessary interactions.
6. It can reduce the supply chain costs by making employees equipped for Work from Home (WFH) scenario.
7. It makes internal hiring easier.

Automation technology in talent assessment is used to assist enterprises by enabling a data-driven hiring process to identify a good fit for a given job position efficiently. This also facilitates applicant scoring, ranking, and sorting to expedite selection. The assessment mainly involves analyses to measure and rank candidates based on technical skills, cognitive capacity, personal traits, situational behavior, etc.

Talent Assessment Techniques

For every job opening with a unique set of skill requirements employers have to create a talent pipeline that helps recruiters assess candidates' varied skills such as cognitive, technical, emotional, leadership, the ability to adapt and match the candidates to suitable responsibilities. Here is where automation of online talent assessment becomes essential.

To take advantage of this system, there are many tools and techniques that are widely used and here is a list of six types of talent assessment techniques that can be conducted online and would be helpful for your hiring processes.

• Pre-screening tests
• Job simulations
• Personality tests
• Psychological tests
• Activities and games
• AI-driven video interviews

How does online talent assessment work?

There are several types of talent assessment techniques and also there are several ways to conduct the same. It totally depends upon the job requirements. There are assessments that could be done over a phone or a video call with a manual evaluation method. There are multiple choice question tests where the answers will be fed to the tool so that the results are also automated. One assessment could be done by sending a word document with a set of questions to be answered and sent back by the candidate which will be evaluated either manually or by using tools that can rank answers based on keywords and phrases. Also, there are some assessments that require complex algorithms and high-end security, the candidate would be made to work on a complex simulation program by giving access to the company’s job server.

When conducting online talent assessment automation becomes inevitable as it makes this process faster and more efficient. Before choosing a tool, one needs to understand and decide the type of assessment and the functionalities to be covered by the tool. Organizations use both external and in-house tools for candidate skill assessment.

Steps to automate online talent assessment

• Identify a tool or a platform that can run your talent assessment and give the results.
• Install the tool as per the instructions.
• Integrate the tool with your existing pipeline.
• Set up an automated session.
• Customize the options so that it gives the required outcome.
• Run a test version or a proof of concept to check the credibility of the outcomes.
• Now, you can run your real-time online assessment.

Tools that help automating candidate assessments

• Toggl hire
• IMocha Skill Assessment
• TestGorilla
• HackEarth
• Glider.ai
• Berke
• Proprofs career assessment software
• Xobin

Challenges

Every technique has drawbacks, like technological issues, voluminous job applications, and lack of face-to-face physical interaction. Growing and large organizations are in constant need to fill operational positions. Large scale industries and enterprises are periodically looking for bulk hiring. For such varying human resource requirements, it becomes difficult to conduct talent assessment, automate the same, and integrate it with the existing talent acquisition pipeline. Further, choosing the best-suited talent assessment tool with optimal features and affordable price range becomes a challenge in a constantly changing environment.

How outsourcing talent acquisition can help you with candidate skill assessment

To meet with the above-mentioned challenges, several organizations outsource the entire talent acquisition process. In external recruitment, candidates are hired using hiring experts and teams from outside the organization where talent assessment would be taken care of by subject matter experts and niche talent acquisition professionals. It allows recruitment businesses and employment agencies to create excellent applicant experiences, enhance engagement, and boost placement rates.

Fast fact- Outsourcing Talent Acquisition is an intelligent business strategy with numerous advantages. Here external experts are hired to handle a company's recruiting process.

Talent acquisition solutions

Here are the major types of external recruitment solutions that perform the required skill assessments along with providing an end-to-end talent acquisition solution.

Recruitment marketplaces: Here is where you get an one-stop hiring solution along with skill-based talent assessment by an internal QC team.

Recruiter marketplaces: You can select an experienced niche/professional as your recruiter who will execute your talent assessment program.

Headhunting agencies: Headhunters seek high-level executive roles for their clients.

Specialized niche hiring agencies: These are recruiting firms specializing in a particular field. For instance, if you are searching for a web developer, you could seek a recruiting firm that specializes in hiring IT professionals.

Bulk-hiring agencies: Bulk hiring is the process of evaluating, shortlisting, and recruiting people on a large scale in a short period of time, depending on the organizational needs.

Conclusion

Enterprises and recruitment agencies have increasingly started utilizing online skill evaluation techniques, tools, and platforms, especially during and after the pandemic. Online talent assessment automation has helped save recruiters’ time and reduce the overall hiring cost for organizations by minimizing redundant steps. The rapid adaptation of online evaluation methods has positively impacted the hiring ecosystem. As a result, hiring became more efficient and candidate-centric while allowing businesses to target candidates with the skills and dispositions necessary for overall success.

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