In today’s competitive job market, it is essential that your recruitment strategy sets you apart from others. Candidates are now dictating the rules of the hiring game, making it increasingly difficult to impress them. To attract top talent, it’s important to begin differentiating yourself as early as the first touchpoint of your recruitment process. This includes the candidate experience, which is crucial as 78% of candidates believe that a company’s recruitment process reflects how they value their employees.
One way to stand out during the application process is by incorporating pre-hiring assessments, which can evaluate personality, culture fit, cognitive abilities, language skills, and other job-specific abilities.
According to the Society for Human Resource Management, 56% of employers already use pre-employment assessments. To ensure that including pre-employment testing positively impacts the candidate experience and helps attract, hire, and retain quality talent.
When incorporating pre-employment assessments into your recruitment process, it is important to prioritize the candidate experience.
How to Find the Right Assessment
Before implementing assessments, ensure that your recruitment team understands their purpose and value. When choosing assessments, consider factors such as difficulty level, engagement, and convenience for the candidates.
Difficulty
It’s important to provide candidates with opportunities to demonstrate their abilities rather than just discussing them. Consider using a test that has a moderate level of difficulty. This approach will allow you to cater to a diverse group of candidates and provide a more personalized candidate experience by avoiding the risk of setting the bar too high or too low.
Engagement
An engaging assessment will lead to more positive attitudes from candidates. Avoid assessments that are overly long or tedious as they will decrease engagement as the candidate progresses. Instead, choose a framework that includes a variety of question types or uses a game-like format. This approach will enhance the candidate experience as research has shown that engagement increases by 60% when a work-related task is gamified.
Convenience
On average, it takes 42 days to fill a position, and candidates spend 3-4 hours updating their resumes, writing cover letters, and submitting their applications. Additionally, preparing for and attending interviews can also take up a lot of time.
Candidates’ time is valuable, especially if they are applying for multiple jobs. Extra steps that prolong the process increase the risk of losing top candidates to companies with more efficient hiring processes.
A recent report by Sterling found that over 70% of candidates have either withdrawn their application or considered it if the process was too lengthy or complex. To avoid this, make sure the assessment framework you choose is not a factor in pushing candidates to withdraw from the recruitment process. According to a study, candidates can complete an assessment up to 45 minutes long without dropping out.
