5 reasons why you should use talent assessment tools for perfect hiring

Hiring the right talent has many obvious benefits to the company — improved productivity, a better team, happy clients… the list is endless. On the other hand, a poor hiring decision can prove to be pretty steep on many counts, leading to reduced efficiency, unhappy team members, higher turnover and a significant cost to the company. A Gallup study estimates the cost of a poor hiring decision to be as much as one and a half to two times the annual salary of the employee.

The good news is that costly poor hiring practices can be fixed with good recruitment strategies. While resumes provide candidate background and an insight into past experience, recruiters know that, often enough, it may exaggerate abilities and responsibilities. Holistic hiring assessment tools add significant value to new-age hiring practices by going beyond skills and knowledge assessment and providing insights into personality, traits and behaviour. Talent assessment tools allow for evidence-based recruitment, which results in recruitment becoming a data-driven process.

The importance of tools and technology in talent assessment

Online hiring tools have led to sweeping changes in the recruitment process. With the COVID-19 pandemic accelerating remote hiring, companies have revamped their hiring practices by adopting tools-based emerging technologies to assess the potential workforce.
AI-powered talent assessments offer several advantages. Let’s take a look at some of them.

Improve quality of hire:

Talent assessments provide hard evidence of candidate ability and help companies understand whether a candidate is a good fit for the role. Automated skill assessments and functional assessments act as filters to assess candidate knowledge and fitment and create shortlists faster, with no manual intervention. Talent assessments thus reduce the time taken for screening candidates and help narrow the talent pool.

Build a cohesive team: Hiring assessment tools let recruiters evaluate a number of parameters for candidates, both in terms of competency and cultural fitment. AI-powered assessments allow for the building of psychological profiles of candidates, analysis of behavioural traits and characteristics, and provide insights into whether the candidate will fit into the job role and organisation culture. Matching candidates to the right role results in a high-performing and greatly skilled team, which in turn results in a highly productive workforce.

Reduce unconscious bias and build a diverse workforce: Traditional hiring methods can be a deterrent to hiring a diverse workforce. In spite of their best efforts, even well-meaning, seasoned recruiters may have implicit biases with respect to race, ethnicity, gender, religion, socio-economic factors or religion, resulting in discrimination of certain groups of people. While organisations can lose out on valuable talent due to such biases, diversity impacts financial performance too. A McKinsey study found that companies in the top quartile for racial, ethnic and gender diversity are likely to have better financial performance. Online assessments use AI and ML technology to eliminate bias by offering several features such as gamification, blind resume screening to ensure anonymity and transparent video interviews that can assess facial and verbal cues to spot any misinformation.

Improve productivity: Recruitment teams stand to make big strides with talent assessment platforms. For example, large volume recruitments in IT can use online coding assessments to host hackathons or programming skills tests. Instant and automated assessment of candidates frees up recruiter time for more productive tasks and reduces time to hire. Skill gaps identified during the hiring process can help determine cross-training and upskilling requirements for the new employee.

Enhance employer brand: Talent assessment tools pave the way for faster results and decisions, creating a positive experience for the job applicant and improving company reputation. Companies can personalise the experience for candidates with custom tests and logos. When talent assessment tools tie into the hiring stack, it results in an automated and seamless candidate experience from interviews to onboarding. A pleasant hiring experience can lead to recommendations by candidates, resulting in the likelihood of expanding the talent pool with relevant and interested people.

Digital hiring platforms that offer talent assessments and functional assessments streamline the recruitment process, resulting in better hiring practices and superior candidate experience. HirePro offers automated, highly secure and fraud-proof coding assessments and functional assessment platforms to test candidate skills, technical and domain knowledge, personality and aptitude, which lets companies onboard the right candidate. Adopting a data-driven talent acquisition strategy can help companies hire better, faster and more efficiently.