A skill assessment test is crucial for every organization to test whether candidates are the right fit for a particular job position. Usually, this should be the first step of any recruitment process.

Hiring a candidate based on a resume is a bad practice. One bad hire can affect the business's overall productivity and cost a business more than an average salary of an employee. Do you know, more than 85% of the resumes are misleading, and about 35% of resumes contain actual lies?

So, to get a real picture of the candidate - skill assessments are conducted. These assessments help recruiters to assess the candidate’s technical skills to make quick and thoughtful hiring decisions.

A skill assessment is one of the best ways to collect data to inform and guide training investments. Benefits include a more competent, energized, and productive staff. It is ideal to judge candidates based on their skills, which can prevent hurting your organizational reputation.

Here are some of the reasons why skills assessments are accurate:

Evaluate Candidates Beyond Their CVs

As we have mentioned above, most candidates lie in their resumes just to land their preferred job. To avoid any bad hire, skill assessments are conducted to evaluate candidates beyond their resumes and get an accurate picture.

Skill assessments give you a deep insight into the candidate’s hard and soft skills, whether they have the skills you’re looking for, and if they’ll be a good fit for your organization.

Reduce Bias

The other reason to conduct skill assessments is that they take the unconscious focus off of race, age, gender, personality, and other characteristics that can lead to bias.

As a recruiter, you need to ensure that your workforce is diverse and comprehensive. A business’s productivity can be improved when you have a team that is reflective of greater difference. Unconscious biases in recruiting can result in hiring the right talent for a particular job role.

Unconscious discrimination can focus on more objective criteria and reduce room for biased hiring and discrimination.

It Helps To Enhance Candidate Experience

When you conduct skill assessments with the help of the right tools and strategies, you are sure to improve the candidate experience. This leads to developing a positive employer brand and improving brand reputation.

Today, most candidates apply for companies where the hiring process is structured, organized, and streamlined. Hence, conducting well-organized skill assessments can do wonders for your organization, and it increases the possibility of attracting the right talent for your organization.

Bulk Hiring Can Be Easily Handled

One of the most important advantages of conducting skill assessments is that it eases the bulk-hiring for recruiters.

But how?

A live coding assessment is a part of a skill assessment where an auto-grading system is involved, and you can assess hundreds of candidates easily based on their scores on the test. It speeds up the recruitment process by allowing you to interview only those candidates who have passed the exam.

Ultimately, it will save a lot of time because it eliminates the need to interview inexperienced candidates.

Decrease In Turnover

As per research by Criteria, it takes 45 days for recruiters to fill a vacant position on average. However, skill assessments speed up the recruitment process and can reduce company turnover.

These assessments are important for every organization and every job position. It helps recruiters assess candidates’ skills effectively and make informed decisions to avoid any unnecessary cost of a bad hire. They can also help ensure that a candidate is the right fit for the culture to improve productivity and avoid any delays in the project.

Handle Skills Gaps

Identifying the candidate’s right skills is one of the primary issues that hiring managers face during recruitment. Unfortunately, more than 80% of HR professionals report a lack of skills in the candidates while interviewing them.

Skill assessments can help recruiters to find the right talent for a particular job role. These assessments automatically grade and differentiates the candidates with their abilities and experience.

Marking skills gaps with skills assessments can help highlight promising candidates who may also need additional training once they’ve been hired in your company.

A candidate is based on two major skills: soft skills and technical skills. To assess each of them, the process of conducting a skill assessment may vary.

For example, suppose you’re looking for an Android developer for your organization. In that case, you need to conduct a coding assessment to assess the candidate’s technical skills. Here mock sales calls, writing assignments, and presentation tests won’t work.

So, to conduct relevant skill assessments, you need to identify which job role you’re hiring for.

Most recruiters believe that including a skill assessment test in the recruiting process will make candidates step out of the hiring process. But, the candidates who are serious about their job can go through any assessments you put in your hiring process.

Still, there’s a high probability that most candidates will step out of the hiring process after knowing that there is a skill assessment part in the recruitment. But, most candidates understand the importance of these tests, which also allows them to find the right company of their choice.

Today, more and more companies are leveraging the power of skill assessments to attract the right talent. Hence, you can also do so by following the below steps:

• Step 1: Define – Identify the job role you’re looking for and set up the skill assessments accordingly.
• Step 2: Measure – Construct a series of predictive assessments to measure the outcomes.
• Step 3: Decide – Make informed decisions with skill assessments.
• Step 4: Evaluate – Check whether there is a positive impact on the company after implementing such assessments.

Are you ready to conduct an effective skill assessment test?

Undoubtedly, these assessments are accurate and give recruiters a clear picture of the candidates beyond their wordy resumes.

You can easily resolve common issues like unconscious biases, skill gaps, deceptive resumes, bulk hiring, etc., after implementing the structured and streamlined skill assessments.