We examined the concept of talent assessment and its importance to organisations in our recent article. The primary importance remains the ability to effectively use talent assessment methods for hiring. However, it is one thing to know this, and it is another to understand how it works.
The key to using assessment for effective talent selection starts with creating a proper talent strategy. This helps you ensure that your hiring can deliver the best candidates. It also eliminates any form of bias in the hiring process. You can also quickly ascertain that your hiring aligns with your values.
To create a good talent assessment strategy, you need to do a few things:
How to Create a Good Talent Assessment Strategy
A. Set clear objectives and develop a success profile
To begin, as the job manager, you must define the ideal candidate in the context of your firm and for each team’s needs. Then, especially if you’re hiring for essential roles, discuss with management what criteria prospective employees must achieve to excel at their jobs.
You’ll need to do this for each role because the requirements may differ—although specific fundamental competencies may overlap between roles.
You must discover how to quantify these skills once you have defined the exact skill set that your ideal applicant must possess. To make the talent assessment process easier, read over your list of important talents or skillsets for each role and prioritise them.
Test for these talents at the start of the hiring process if you’re employing skills tests. Then move on to the most qualified candidates.
B. Choose your selection tools
Choose the selection/ assessment tools that will provide the data needed to make informed selection/recruiting decisions based on the success profile. Determine whether you should purchase good, valid assessment tools from a vendor or create your own tests.
Rather than fewer, aim for more assessments. Cost-benefit analysis frequently reveals that even if a selection tool only improves predictive validity by a small amount, it will provide a very high return on investment.
C. Establish an effective recruitment process
Your hiring procedure will have a direct impact on the success of your hires and, as a result, the success of your firm. This is why it’s critical to employ tried and tested, well-structured procedures and strategies rather than relying on luck.
Talent evaluations are an important part of a data-driven hiring process because they help you find talented, well-qualified individuals. However, the hiring process encompasses more than just talent evaluations.
You must first establish a clear job description, post the available position on job sites and LinkedIn, and gather resumes before performing talent assessments (via an ATS, for example). After that, you can give skills tests to evaluate and screen your candidates’ abilities, experience, and knowledge.
Finally, once you’ve identified your top prospects, you may conduct structured interviews with them to improve your evaluation and gain a deeper understanding of their individual strengths and limitations.
Proper Candidate Engagement Is Important in the Talent Assessment Process
Gamified assessment has proven to be one of the most important tools for candidate engagement. Candidates are introduced to a more practical and fun assessment exercise that tests competencies such as problem-solving ability, teamwork, time management, communication, etc.
If you’re conducting talent assessments at your firm, it’s always a good idea to keep your applicants informed about the status of their applications and let them know if they’ll be going on to the next step of the hiring process.
You must always remember that your recruitment process says a lot about your organisation. Therefore, you must ensure you don’t go silent on candidates for no reason. You should also properly schedule your communication process with candidates with favourable timelines at every stage of the hiring process. Failure to do this could lead to the loss of your best potential talent.
Assessment Tools and Methods for Hiring
Organisations can utilise a variety of strategies to help them choose the best evaluation instrument. The first step is to do a detailed job analysis, which is followed by an examination of the many types of assessment methods accessible.
When conducting a job analysis, what you need to consider are enumerated below:
- Your Talent acquisition experts will work with line managers to compile a list of work activities and skills that employees require.
- Your talent acquisition experts will rank the most important work tasks and competencies for optimal job performance.
- They will analyse the data to determine which work activities and competencies are most important to your company.
- They will then choose assessments that evaluate the execution of the most important work activities or competencies.
Some of the most important assessment methods for hiring/recruiting is the Psychometric Assessment, and examples of such include:
- Cognitive Ability Assessment
- Behavioural Assessment
- Job Simulation Assessment
- Personality Assessment
- Technical Skills Assessment
- Communications Skills Assessment
- Situational Judgement Assessment
Each assessment method is dependent on the competency that you want to test in the candidate. For a particular job role, you are likely to use a combination of these assessment tools to test for the different competencies and skills that you have identified during your job analysis.
Things to consider when selecting your assessment methods include the validity of the assessment, which shows how predictive the assessment will be, the cost; how fair the assessment is to people from all walks of life; and the reaction you have received in the past from candidates about the assessment.
Notable Talent Assessment Trends to Enhance Hiring
According to an SHRM report, here are some talent assessment trends to note:
- Machine learning and analytics are introducing new assessment techniques.
- Globalisation requires localised assessments that can easily reach overseas.
- Technology is enabling on-demand, online assessments with immediate results and feedback.
- More firms are using immersive, compelling assessment experiences.
- Organisations want a personalised and contextualised assessment.
- Candidate-centric hiring requires shorter, more transparent and engaging candidate experiences.
It is important to emphasise that talent assessment is a way to promote the employer’s brand. Therefore, a candidate-driven assessment process that ensures candidates enjoy the process even if they are not hired is important.
It is easy for candidates to go to social media and share their experiences undergoing your recruitment process, and whether their feedback is positive or negative depends on how they were treated.
Technology is also making recruitment easier and more efficient; therefore, you must ensure you invest in and incorporate relevant technological tools.
As mentioned earlier, gamified assessments are also becoming common, as they are new ways to make assessments fun and robust, with relevant competencies such as creative and critical thinking abilities, teamwork and interpersonal relations skills, among others, being assessed.
To schedule a consultation on how to utilise assessment tools and methods to hire effectively, please click here, and an expert will be in touch with you.
