Five advantages of job-specific functional tests in recruitment

Recruiting the right candidates is a continuous and long-term process. It is also a vital yet resource-intensive process with several moving parts, including screening, shortlisting, assessing, interviewing and onboarding. A job-specific functional test helps streamline the hiring process by testing a candidate’s personality, aptitude and technical and domain skills to help accurately spot candidates who are the right fit for your organisation. A job-specific functional test gives an accurate estimation of candidate performance and ensures that a candidate is able to efficiently and effectively fulfil unique job requirements.

Here are five advantages of job-specific functional tests.

Gauge a candidate’s ability with precision

Job-specific functional tests use customised questions presented in various formats such as MCQs, descriptive and coding to analyse whether a candidate is suitable for a specific domain or role. Advanced recruitment software provides hiring managers with a vast library of questions prepared by subject matter experts to ensure the highest accuracy and quality of questions. The software also evaluates the answers given by the candidate and prepares a precise and data-rich report to help the hiring manager decide whether an in-depth interview with the candidate can follow. Besides, the test report also provides meaningful talking points for an in-depth interview.

Reduce time-to-hire and cost-per-hire

To fulfil the rising demand for tech talent, organisations often opt for bulk-hiring. However, maintaining the quality of hires during large-scale hiring remains a challenge. Job-specific functional tests are an effective way to filter the best-suited candidates for specific roles. They save time and keep the cost of resources minimal. They also reduce the need for laborious scanning of resumes and time-consuming interviews. Since quick and accurate hiring decisions can be made using the detailed data provided in the test reports, job-specific functional tests accelerate hiring at scale.

Deter cheating

There is a possibility of candidates giving false or contrived responses during personality tests. Besides, the subjective answers that are given by candidates often yield inaccurate results and may lead to the hiring of candidates who may not be the right cultural fit for your team. Job-specific functional tests, on the other hand, are objective and when conducted using recruitment software, they give accurate results and reports on candidate performance. In addition, advanced recruitment software provides several tools such as candidate ID verification, impersonation detection, proctoring and plagiarism reports that enable you to instantly disqualify candidates indulging in fraudulent behaviour or suspicious activity.

Prevent potential mis-hires

Hiring managers that do not deploy job-specific functional tests stand to inadvertently onboard more than a handful of mis-hires. The cost of bad hires is often staggeringly high as it involves all the resources employed in hiring and training a new hire. Besides, compensation, opportunity costs and wasted time contribute to substantially high operating expenses. Job-specific functional tests are a surefire way of sidestepping potential mis-hires as they allow you to exhaustively assess candidates and make data-driven hiring decisions to ensure they are the right fit for the role, the team and your organisation.

Eliminate biases in the hiring process

Conscious and unconscious biases in the hiring process severely inhibit diversity, undermine recruitment efforts and reduce the retention rate. Biases may lead to the rejection of good candidates and the acceptance of unsuitable ones. Job-specific functional tests make an objective assessment of a candidate’s suitability and hence are a practical way to remove biases in hiring. Further, the objective results of these tests enable hiring managers to circumvent their biases to make better hiring decisions that are based on data rather than instincts or feelings.

Conclusion

Organisations are increasingly choosing job-specific functional tests to find the best candidates quickly and efficiently. Since these tests can be customised to test candidates for a wide array of roles and responsibilities, they speed up and streamline the hiring process. Besides, online assessment platforms have simplified the process of conducting job-specific functional tests at scale. They provide myriad assessment formats to help you assess candidates for specific requirements. Advanced online assessment platforms also provide several additional features such as intuitive user interfaces, ATS synchronisation of test data and 24/7 tech support via email or phone to facilitate a smooth experience for candidates and test administrators.

HirePro’s functional assessments are fraud-proof and scientifically crafted to suit any role, domain or industry. HirePro’s comprehensive library of +100k questions, diverse question formats and granular access control enable you to test candidates in a wide array of skills with ease. Find out how HirePro can help you achieve a superior candidate and test administrator experience in job-specific functional tests.