Types of Assessments for Campus Recruitment
Campuses are a treasure trove of young talent, eager to learn and adapt to new environments. That is why most organisations spend time and effort to recruit from campuses, despite the hassle. However, many recruiters feel that campuses are a mixed bag of cards, considering the effort and time required. Quite often, the young recruits might end up not being a right fit and this in turn could lead to low productivity and high attrition. The bane of any hiring team!
The trick is to find the right talent for your needs. Talent that fits your technical requirements and is also a good cultural fit. That is the only way you can be assured of retaining the talent you went to such pains to recruit.
The Elephant in the Room
Why not go ahead and recruit students from the best colleges around the country, based on their academic performance alone? The skill gap is the elephant in the room! As per the 2019 Skills India Report, the Indian workforce is estimated to increase to 600 Million approximately by the year 2022. However, the India Skills Report released in Feb 2021 states that only 45.9% of the graduates in India are employable. This makes it imperative that employers validate the skills of the campus recruits independent of their academic performance.
The Assessment Tools in your Arsenal
There are a variety of assessments available to evaluate candidates. A well planned assessment strategy that focuses on the candidate’s technical capabilities as well as soft skills will empower you to find the right candidate for the job. Many hiring partners are able to tailor assessments to meet your organisation’s requirements. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of such assessments:
Man with a brain picture on the sign. Concept of education, intellectual person. Professional is looking for work, brain drain abroad. Lack of specialists workers. Brainstorming, thirst for knowledge
- Personality Test
Personality assessments help you assess important traits such as openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and stability. They also let you judge characteristics such as sociability, leadership orientation, cooperation, consideration, dependability, efficiency, even-temperament, self-confidence, abstract thinking and creative thinking.
Different types of personality assessments have been developed over the years. Here are a few of the more popular ones.
- Big Five Personality Model (OCEAN)
This model measures these five factors of a person’s personality:
Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism.
These factors are further divided into aspects and then into specific facets.
- Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)
The MBTI classifies people into 16 personality ‘types’. These types are extracted from four dichotomies:
Extraversion-Introversion, Sensing-Intuition, Thinking-Feeling, and Judging-Perceiving.
- DISC
The DISC assessment is a behavioural assessment tool, rather than a tool that assesses your personality. It measures four points called behaviour areas:
Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, and Conscientiousness.
It puts individuals into one of 12 profiles.
Personality assessments, done early on in the screening process of candidates, provide valuable insights that enable you to identify ideal candidates.
- Behavioural Assessment
These are assessments that enable you to predict the behaviour of your candidate using a simulated work environment. It helps hiring teams to evaluate whether the candidate will be a good cultural fit, and identify candidates for a specific role. Some of the commonly used behavioral assessment tools are – simulated judgement tests, group discussions, group activities, caselet sets etc.
- Cognitive Ability Test
Higher cognitive ability is correlated by 84% higher job performance. So, it is imperative that you test for cognitive abilities during candidate screening. Most of the tests for cognitive abilities evaluate the candidate’s logical reasoning through induction or deduction. In other words, cognitive ability tests assess a candidate’s ability to apply mental processes to solve on-the-job problems. Reasoning, perception, mathematical ability and verbal ability are some of the attributes associated with cognition and the ability to acquire new job knowledge.
- Coding Tests
If you are in the business of hiring techies then coding tests are a must. You can auto-assess the skills related to backend programming, database programming, data science programming, frontend programming, scripting, and more, using compilers and validated test cases. A hiring partner, such as HirePro, enables you to design the tests for screenings, capability assessments, or hackathons based on your needs. You could also host interactive coding sessions with candidates to accurately assess their technical skills.
Here are some insights which will streamline your selection process:
- Stack rank: rank, percentile, marks
- Code status: compilation status, test case status, time to solve
- Code performance: average memory consumption, average execution time
- Code quality: cyclomatic complexity, lines of code, plagiarism score
- Role-based Tests
Would you give a coding test when trying to hire an account manager for an insurance broker? No, right? You need a role-based or job-specific test to evaluate the competency of a candidate. The test should be able to evaluate whether the candidate has the competency necessary for the role. For example, an account manager for an insurance broker should have a basic understanding of the insurance principles and laws that are applicable. It would also be advisable for the manager to be proficient in the basic principles of statistics, such as probability. You can customize your role-based tests to include tests for advanced quantitative abilities too. This will enable you to hire the best fit for the role.
- Remote Work Assessment
Remote work has become an increasingly pervasive style of working. Soft skills such as communication, time management, self-motivation and responsibility are important traits that affect employee productivity when working remotely. These traits could further influence the efficiency and morale of the entire team. This in turn makes hiring with a keen look out for these traits an essential part of today’s hiring reality. You could use personality and behavioural assessments to validate these traits in an employee. A focus on these traits will enable you to assess employee readiness to ensure business continuity.
- Learning Agility
A World Economic Forum report estimates that by 2025, 85 million jobs may be displaced by machines, but 97 million new jobs may emerge due to a new dynamic between people and technology. Most CEOs agree that the skill gap is one of the biggest threats to business continuity and success. Finding employees with the ability to learn on the job, and apply their knowledge to new situations, is essential for the organisation’s growth. Keep this in mind when designing your campus recruitment assessments. It’s just a matter of tweaking your assessments to include this facet of a candidate’s personality.
- Digital Readiness
The fourth industrial revolution has made digitization an inherent part of life. The remote working requirements that COVID-19 imposed on us have further emphasized the need for digitization and automation. It is imperative that you hire employees who are digitally ready, even if their job profile does not really require this skill set. Hence, even if you are hiring a technician for your laboratory, it would serve you best if you validated the candidate for digital readiness as well. If you doubt this logic, all you need to do is recall the mayhem and confusion that preceded schools moving to a digital classroom structure post the onset of the pandemic. You can easily embed a digital readiness test into your current array of assessments with the help of a capable hiring partner.
- Language Proficiency Test
Every job requires some level of communication. Some more than others, but basic communications skills are essential in any job. This makes language proficiency vital to the candidate’s effectiveness on the job. Language tests can be tailored to a job role so that you do not overwhelm candidates with an unnecessarily tough test.
The assessments you design for your campus recruitment do not just enable you to hire the best candidates. They also help to build your employer brand. An assessment package that keeps candidates engaged will make you more appealing as an employer. Many organisations have now started including elements of gamification in their recruitment assessments. This not only keeps the candidates engaged but also gives you the opportunity to include simulations to judge how well candidates react to work scenarios. The added advantage you now have is the ability to actually do all your recruitment assessments remotely. This helps you save on cost and time while evaluating a larger number of candidates. A well planned and executed assessment schedule for your campus recruitment efforts can result in a higher ROI for your hiring team.
If you want to learn more about customised assessments for campus recruitment, please reach out to us @ +91-80-66560000 or sales@hirepro.in.
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