Recruitment tests – little helpers or false friends?

How can personality tests and assessment help finding the right candidate?

Personality tests and assessments support recruiters in getting a better understanding of a potential candidates character, skills or knowledge.

There are many pre-build tests available that can efficiently query interesting factors and provide the results immediately. This allows you to explore characteristics or abilities that you don’t have time for in a direct interview.

It is also possible to pre-test and then discuss or test them more precisely in the direct interview. Hence, tests and assessments serve recruiters gathering information in a timely manner.

How do tests and assessments differ?

With personality tests one can get a closer look into the personality traits. For recruiters this means being able get a better understanding of the candidates qualifications regarding requirements such as cultural fit, leadership qualities or emotional intelligence.

Assessments on the other hand check professional knowledge or skills, for example mathematical skills, strategic thinking or industry knowledge. Both can be performed individually or as part of an assessment center.

How to ensure the significance of recruitment tests?

Tests can do a lot for you – if created and evaluated correctly to give you information you can work with.

Creating:

When choosing or creating a recruitment tests always make sure that the test fits the requirements of the vacancy and of your company. The test should ask specific questions that are relevant to the job or company and check important qualifications. Does your Tech Lead need to know when Mozart was born? Probably not. But it could be interesting how he deals with a power outage or if he knows how to lead a diverse team. The market offers many tests with pre-defined questions; you can alter to the needs of your company and the vacancy to create a good fit between what you need to know and which questions you want to ask.

Evaluating:

Recruitment tests can gather a lot of information and present them to you in a way that makes them easily comparable. However, remember to validate the information. This can be done in further assessments such as roleplays or case studies or in an interview setting. Please avoid rejecting candidates based on their test scores without gathering further information about them. Test scores are an indicator only.

What else needs to be considered?

Always consider the hiring process from your candidates perspective. Recruitment tests can be time consuming or difficult to understand. Make sure your candidates have a positive experience in your hiring process and choose or create tests which are short, useful and easy to do in terms of understandable questions or needed tools. Also make sure you can provide appreciative feedback to your candidates with a detailed and comprehensible report about the results.

If your recruitment process includes multiple recruiters make sure all of them are handling tests and especially their results in the same way to ensure comparable candidate-scores.

We recommend to keep the documented results of our hires in the personnel files. After months or even years certain results can be used again for further assessments, evaluating your hiring processes or even to design development programs.

You are not sure whether tests can support your hiring process in a meaningful way?

You would like to include recruitment tests in your hiring process and need help finding the right ones for your vacancies?

Contact us and we will be happy to arrange a non-binding discussion to provide you with the best possible support in implementing recruitment tests in your hiring process.