Written by John Field, Vice President, Product Management
Amid staffing challenges, companies need a solid strategy in place for talent recruitment. This doesn’t just mean attracting talent to apply. Once you have that applicant pool, you need screening and selection procedures in place to ensure you’re bringing the right people into the organisation. Screening involves filtering out candidates who aren’t the right fit, and selection involves identifying the best fit for your organisation and the position.
How can you make those determinations? This is where assessment technology comes in. Nine in 10 organisations use some sort of assessment to help inform hiring decisions.1 But is your assessment technology actually helping you identify and hire the best fits, or is it holding you back?
How the wrong assessment software can hurt your recruitment
Some common issues plague assessment solutions and hurt their effectiveness, including:
- Failing to effectively measure what success looks like for the role or for your organisation
- Giving the wrong brand impression through a dated look and feel
- Making the process unclear or cumbersome to navigate, causing applicants to drop off before completion
- Lacking predictive results, which often occurs when assessments are developed in-house or by an unqualified vendor
These problems can all contribute to an assessment solution that is ultimately less effective at engaging and identifying top candidates. To avoid these problems, you need a solution that offers a great user experience and is truly predictive in nature.
The importance of a positive candidate experience
Candidates should have a positive experience taking your assessment, finding the software intuitive to use (regardless of the type of device they’re using to access it) and remaining engaged throughout. From the applicant’s perspective, the process as a whole and the questions they answer should feel relevant to the job they’re interested in.
A good way to measure your candidate experience is to see what percentage of those who begin the assessment process finish it. Your online recruitment process must be swift and effective. According to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), many organisations, unfortunately, experience high candidate dropout rates during their application processes, with pre-hire assessments contributing to the problem.2
At Talogy, we found that, typically, greater than 90 percent of those who start our assessments finish the test. In fact, in many cases, the few who do not finish technically began the process but didn’t even begin answering questions, suggesting that it was not the assessment itself that caused them to drop off.
Why is a positive candidate experience so important? Remember that talent recruitment isn’t just about picking the right employees but about them picking you as an employer. You should think of your assessment as an important early step in building the foundation for a strong employee-employer relationship.
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