Pre-Hire Candidate Skill Assessments: What They Are, Different Types, How to Build One
Last Updated November 20, 2024
Hiring is a high-stakes game for employers. In fact, just one bad hire costs businesses, on average, $17,000. So, whether you’re an established recruiter or you’re starting your own staffing agency, you must implement candidate skill assessments to help navigate a cutthroat labor market.
In this competitive climate, you need more than resumes and interviews to find the best candidate for the job. Candidate skill assessments are an objective way to evaluate the skills that matter most for each role. The right recruitment assessment tools will help you make data-driven hiring decisions and source candidates with the right hard and soft skills.
But this is more than just a personality test. Business leaders still need to map skills to job listings, choose appropriate assessments, and hire the best candidate for the job. Follow the tips in this guide to create a perfect candidate skill assessment and fill your clients’ empty positions in less time.
What Is a Candidate Skill Assessment?
Recruiters and staffing agencies create candidate skill assessments to evaluate a potential hire’s abilities. These assessments are considered a staffing agency best practice because they focus less on personality and more on the person’s skills related to the job.
But what is the purpose of a skill assessment? It’s simple: by using recruitment assessment tools, you evaluate whether a candidate is actually a good fit for the role.
It’s your responsibility to pinpoint qualified candidates for your clients. Rather than funneling the most outgoing candidates to clients, you approve people with the strongest skills instead. That ensures qualified, productive candidates move forward, increasing your client’s chances of success.
What Is the Purpose of a Candidate Skill Assessment?
It’s no secret that job candidates occasionally oversell themselves on their resumes. Staffing agencies must sift through candidate information to determine their on-the-job skills. Since 56% of talent firms struggle to source quality talent pools, it’s no wonder why many agencies are turning to skills-based assessments before the interview stage.
Skill assessments also help recruiters:
- Evaluate technical skills
- Improve candidate quality
- Reduce turnover
- Assess soft skills like teamwork and communication
Skill assessments are also a must-have for equitable hiring. They give nontraditional candidates a chance to showcase their skills, focusing less on personality and more on their ability to do the job well. Ultimately, these assessments ensure the right candidates fill the right positions, increasing your client’s long-term success.
The 4 Types of Skill Assessments
Most staffing agencies use four types of skill assessments to gather more information about a candidate’s abilities.
1. Technical Assessment
A job skills assessment focuses on the technical skills required to perform the job. For example, if you’re hiring a graphic designer, you might test their proficiency in design software. In some cases, that might mean asking how they would navigate certain software features, while other times, it might mean asking them to run through the software with you.
2. Cognitive Assessment
Cognitive skill assessments analyze a candidate’s way of thinking. These assessments are more common for director and manager-level jobs where critical thinking is a must. Most cognitive assessments ask the candidate to walk through solving a particular problem. What matters isn’t that they get the answer right but that they follow a logical method for drawing conclusions. If they struggle to think through the problem or communicate their thought process, they might not be a good fit.
3. Soft Skills Assessment
Technical skills matter, but they pale in comparison to soft skills. After all, if a candidate is great at their job but terrible to work with, the hire just won’t work out.
Assessing soft skills in candidates can help determine how well they will fit into your client’s company culture. Everyone needs solid soft skills, but these assessments are most crucial in jobs with lots of interpersonal interaction or leadership.
4. Behavioral Assessment
Also known as simulation assessments, behavioral interviews ask candidates hypothetical questions and gauge their responses. This option measures a candidate’s practical skills through real-world problem-solving exercises. These tests help assess a candidate’s ability to apply their knowledge in actual scenarios, providing insight into their problem-solving abilities.
Examples of Skill Assessments
Skill assessments are a fantastic recruitment tool, but there are many ways to do them. Here are just a few skill assessment examples.
Coding Challenges
Software development roles are highly technical, so they’re the perfect fit for skill-based testing. With coding challenges, you give candidates a small coding problem to solve. Not only does this verify their technical skills, but it also helps you assess their problem-solving abilities.
Case Studies
How do you know if an aspiring business leader has the skills necessary to generate business outcomes? Case studies are a great job skill assessment. With this option, you give candidates a real-world business problem and ask them to provide solutions. This type of assessment gives you insight into decision-making capabilities, thought processes, and strategic thinking skills.
Work Simulations
This type of assessment is slightly different from a case study. With work simulations, you don’t ask candidates to solve an overarching problem but to lead you through a specific process or software feature. For example, if the candidate says they’re familiar with Excel, you can ask them to walk through how to create a pivot table. This assessment is great for measuring a candidate’s communication skills as well as their level of comfort with job-specific software and processes.
How to Build a Candidate Skill Assessment
There are plenty of readymade candidate skill assessments on the market, but the best assessments are tailored to the needs of your clients. Follow these steps to build an effective candidate skill assessment.
1. Identify Top-Priority Skills for Each Available Position
Testing for every possible skill would result in long, cumbersome tests. Instead of trying to measure everything, create a more focused assessment that measures the most important skills first. What are the three most important skills for each role?
Ultimately, your candidate skill assessment should focus on the most essential skills that have a direct impact on performance. For example, the top skills for a customer service role might be de-escalation, communication, and time management. For a developer, that would include technical skills like JavaScript proficiency.
2. Choose Between a DIY or Paid Skill Assessment
Once you know the key skills for each job role, decide whether to buy an existing assessment or create your own. DIY assessments are great for customizing the assessment to your client’s specific needs, but they require a lot of time and resources to develop and manage. Staffing agencies often rely on recruitment assessment tools, which are readymade and quick to implement. The downside is that they aren’t very customizable, making them a poor fit for clients with very specific needs.
Most agencies use a blend of DIY and paid skill assessments. If you’re just starting an agency and have few resources, you’ll likely need to stick with pre-built assessments.
3. Identify the Type of Skill Assessment
What type of candidate assessment will best measure a candidate’s skills? For example, a simulation would likely be a better fit for assessing soft skills, while a technical test would be a better fit for hard skills, like software proficiency.
At this stage, it’s also important to determine the testing format. Will you administer the test in person or virtually? Most candidates expect to complete these assessments virtually, but some clients might prefer to do them in person to validate the candidate’s identity and reduce the odds of fraud.
4. Create a Test for These Skills
Design practical, scenario-based questions or tasks that allow candidates to demonstrate their proficiency. Whether you’re focusing on candidate testing for technical skills or assessing candidate skill level for more creative roles, make sure the test reflects real-world job demands.
5. Have Colleagues Review the Assessment and Use Their Input
Subject matter experts should always walk through the candidate skill assessment before you roll it out. Have team members, especially those familiar with the role, review the test for clarity, relevance, and fairness. Their insights can help refine the assessment, ensuring it effectively evaluates the necessary skills without any unnecessary complexity.
Other Tips for Improving Your Candidate Pipeline
Sourcing quality candidates is a must-have skill for running a successful staffing agency. But how do you get candidates to your agency?
Follow these tips to build a strong candidate pipeline.
Invest in Talent Assessment Software and Other Skill Assessment Tools
Staffing agencies receive hundreds of applications for a single position. All of those messages, resumes, and assessments add up quickly, even for small agencies. Invest in talent assessment software to tame the chaos. These platforms help you automate talent skills assessments, ensuring you consistently evaluate every candidate. Best of all, these platforms automate the entire process and provide a much-needed audit trail.
Know How to Conduct an Effective Behavioral Test or Interview
If a candidate succeeds in the skills assessment, they move on to the next stage of the hiring process. As a recruiter, you need to know how to conduct an effective behavioral test during the interview. This stage focuses more on soft skills and communication. Ask the candidate open-ended questions to learn more about their decision-making processes and how they handled specific situations in the past. By focusing on past behavior and experiences, you get valuable insights into how a candidate will perform for your client.
Ensure You’re Effectively Sourcing Candidates
Sourcing is key to building a strong candidate pipeline. Work with your marketing team to generate interest via:
- Job boards
- Social media
- Job fairs and networking events
- Referral programs
You want to reach a wide, diverse pool of candidates. The more diverse the candidate pool, the easier it will be to match candidates with your client’s job postings.
In-Summary: Candidate Skill Assessments
Candidate skill assessments make it easier for recruiting and staffing agencies to verify candidates’ soft and technical skills. With a combination of skill-based testing and recruitment assessment tools, recruiters can better evaluate candidates at scale, make better hiring recommendations, and improve new-hire retention.
Michael McCareins is the Content Marketing Associate at altLINE, where he is dedicated to creating and managing optimal content for readers. Following a brief career in media relations, Michael has discovered a passion for content marketing through developing unique, informative content to help audiences better understand ideas and topics such as invoice factoring and A/R financing.
