As you can imagine, when you have a job opening for your company, many qualified candidates want to fill the position. However, finding one person with all of the skills needed to handle this new role will fit in well and feel comfortable within the work environment isn’t easy. Hiring tests are a common way to assess a new hire’s skills and abilities. They can be created in various ways, but the most popular is the new hire assessment tests. Including pre-employment testing in your recruiting strategy is a beautiful approach to expedite the hiring process or evaluate equally qualified candidates side by side. However, test results are not necessarily the most accurate reflection of a candidate’s genuine ability. Because you must create, conduct, and assess the tests yourself, using a recruiting test in your recruitment process may be expensive and time-consuming. That is until you use innovative employment testing software such as Criteria. Instead of creating your own recruiting exams, you’ll have access to five distinct sorts of employment tests in hundreds of various designs to fit your prospects exactly. Today, we’ll go through the essential steps you can take to build and execute the ideal recruiting exam with Criteria by your side.
The Simple Steps to Making a Hiring Test
The benefit of implementing a recruiting test as part of your recruitment process is that it may eliminate the need for hundreds of face-to-face interviews. In addition, it may help speed up the recruiting process by weeding out unsuitable applicants for opportunities that sparked an interest. These are significant time saves. Unstructured interviews, resume checks, and phone interviews are less objective than tests. If you’ve previously battled to keep prejudice out of your recruiting process, implementing a test is a terrific method to do so. Finally, all applicants must pass the same recruiting examinations. As a result, you’ll be able to compare applicants’ abilities and performance side by side. An intelligent assessment tool like Criteria makes creating and giving recruiting exams even simpler. Criteria create multidimensional evaluations supported by science and offered through a simple platform to help you get the most out of your talent pool. You’ll get access to a database with hundreds of exams, including cognitive aptitude, personality, emotional intelligence, risk, and skills.
You may construct your recruiting exam by combining as many tests as you want, and you can test as many people as you wish at any point of the hiring process with limitless testing. In addition, criteria work seamlessly with some of the most popular recruitment applications, like Breezy HR, Greenhouse, and Workable, allowing you to maintain all of your applicant data in one place!
Parts of Creating a Hiring Test That Are Difficult
One of the most challenging aspects of designing and implementing recruiting tests in your hiring process is that they seldom provide a complete picture of a candidate’s talents. Job knowledge assessments, for example, are excellent for evaluating job-specific abilities. However, they do not consider a candidate’s desire to learn or how rapidly they might master a skill if given a chance. On the other hand, personality tests can demonstrate which candidates would fit in nicely with your current team, but they can’t tell you whether or not they have the necessary expertise. Furthermore, specific examinations, such as integrity or work ethics assessments, might anticipate applicants to bend the truth of their responses. We all want to present ourselves in the best possible light, and the candidate is no exception. Therefore, when looking at the findings of these sorts of tests, it’s crucial to keep this in mind. Finally, you must be cautious not to violate anti-discrimination rules while developing employment exams. Staying out of trouble here requires using software like Criteria, which maintains exams inside the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) regulations.
Step 1: Determine Who Your Ideal Candidate Is.
To construct a recruiting exam that effectively captures the information you’re looking for from prospects, you’ll need first to figure out who the perfect candidate is.
- Create a candidate avatar that represents your ideal candidate.
Developing a candidate avatar, similar to creating an ideal client avatar when beginning a firm, can assist you in determining what the perfect candidate looks like. For example, what type of qualifications or experience does the applicant have? What personality attributes do they need to make a seamless transition into the position? What have they accomplished so far in their careers? What are their objectives? What distinguishes them from other candidates? This exercise will assist you in developing a focused recruiting exam and assist you in fine-tuning the overall hiring process.
- Define the skills that are required.
The ideal applicant will have a unique skill set that includes hard and soft abilities. Hard skills include the number of years of experience in certain work positions, educational requirements, and certifications or credentials needed to be considered for the job. Interpersonal skills, communication skills, organizational skills, problem-solving ability, and any personality attributes essential to succeed in the profession are examples of soft skills.
Your ideal applicant avatar should be similar to the job description you’ve posted and vice versa. After all, you want to start the employment process by attracting the best prospect.
Step 2: Select the Tests to Use.
When you use robust assessment software like Criteria, you’ll have access to various exams. However, you must still choose which exams to employ, how many tests to include, and when to have applicants complete them.
- Select the Appropriate Test Style
Your recruiting position will ultimately determine the exams you utilize. However, you must go one step further by selecting the appropriate style for each exam. For example, someone who excels in arithmetic may struggle on an exam that demands critical or philosophical thinking, even if they are otherwise an excellent candidate. Criteria provide eight distinct cognitive aptitude exams, ranging from general to mechanical aptitude testing and games that assess mental capacity. If testing for cognitive ability isn’t a priority for you, this style variant is the same for all exam kinds. If you’re unsure which exam to utilize, Criteria enables you to search for the ideal test for your organization by sector or job function.
- Decide on the number of tests to administer.
It’s a tight line to tread between collecting a well-rounded collection of data and performing every exam in the book. In an ideal world, you’d integrate various exams to assess prospects on many aspects. Including too many exams, on the other hand, is a specific method to discourage candidates from completing the application process. Criteria suggest that total testing duration be limited to 40 minutes, with two to three different tests done. This will enable you to gather a reasonable quantity of data while decreasing the number of applicants who drop out owing to testing criteria that are too demanding.
If you believe further testing is necessary, you may hold off on administering the second set of exams to the remaining applicants until later in the recruiting process.
- When Should You Test During Your Hiring Process?
There are many aspects to consider when it comes to including recruiting exams in the recruitment process. Incorporating it after the first interview is sufficient if the position has few applicants and requires specific skill sets or critical thinking abilities. The purpose of the exam is to validate the capabilities addressed during the interview. If, on the other hand, the position has sparked a lot of interest from comparable individuals, having the recruiting test after application submission but before interviews is a terrific method to narrow down the interview pool rapidly.
Step 3: Create the Hiring Test.
It’s time to develop the recruiting exam after you’ve formed a clear grasp of what the perfect applicant looks like and which tests are suited for your company.
- Create a Personalized Assessment Process
With Criteria, creating your hiring test is simple with just the click of a button. But instead of sending the test to candidates as is, you will have the opportunity to Create a Personalized Assessment Process for your candidates.
Take the time to upload your logo and branding style to Criteria’s assessment platform so that your applicants get a consistent, on-brand experience from the start.
- Validity must be established.
Although Criteria have established their validity for all its tests, it’s a great idea to Validity must be found within your organization. This will help you assess whether the candidate is an excellent fit for the role and how they compare to existing employees in similar positions. You may do this by requesting current workers to take the exam. The findings will serve as a standard for determining your internal minimum and maximum cut-off scores, which will be used to screen out unqualified individuals.
Step 4: Conduct The Examination.
When you begin the recruiting process, this stage will automatically occur. However, when disseminating the recruiting exams, there are a few things to bear in mind.
- Allow time to prepare for the test.
Your candidates will be aware that pre-employment testing is a component of your hiring process in an ideal world. But it doesn’t mean you should simply go ahead and tell them. Many applicants value the opportunity to familiarize themselves with the exam and even take a few practice tests to improve their chances of succeeding. Somewhat of providing the exam to applicants right away and giving them a limited time to complete it, communicate when the test will be issued and what sort of test it will be so they have enough time to prepare.
- Set a Time Limit for the Test
Setting a deadline for applicants to take the exam is critical to staying on track with your recruiting process’s estimated duration. As a general rule, after the exam window has opened, give applicants at least 72 hours to finish the test. However, one week would be a more reasonable timeline.
- Candidate Pipeline Management
You’ll almost certainly have to hunt down a few applicants who don’t finish their tests within the allowed testing period.
A report of each applicant’s progress in the candidate pipeline may be seen inside the Criteria platform. This makes it simple to see which applicants need to be reminded to finish their tests. From the Criteria dashboard, you can also send them email reminders.
Step 5: Examine the results of the tests.
It’s time to assess the test results and move on to the next step of your employment procedure after the testing session has ended. Criteria enable you to keep track of test outcomes in real-time by opting to get test reports directly in your mailbox once an applicant completes the exam. In addition, criteria will provide score reports that are simple to comprehend and full of helpful information if you choose to wait until the testing session has ended.
- Examine the Candidate Results
Criteria give you all the tools to compare your prospects’ scores. You may also create your baseline based on the outcomes of your present workers. Criteria can quickly decide whether individuals are a good fit for your company based on their ratings and consolidate the crucial information gathered from each person in one spot.
After choosing the most acceptable candidates, you may go through their thorough score reports to learn more about them before moving on to the next phase.
- Importing Data Into Recruiting Software
You may also import all of the essential data Criteria has gathered into current tools like Breezy HR, Workable, and Greenhouse. This will enable you to refer to the test findings in subsequent conversations with each applicant over the rest of the hiring process.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you create hiring criteria?
A: A company’s hiring criteria must be clear. This helps to ensure that the best candidates get engaged, and it also gives employers a better understanding of what they need in certain positions.
How do you calculate hiring?
A: Hiring is a business concept where an employer contracts work to outside parties in exchange for payment.; A hiring manager helps coordinate and manage the process.
What is a hiring assessment?
A: A hiring assessment is a test that goes over the skills and abilities of an applicant to determine if they are qualified for the position. The three most common types of hiring assessments include intelligence tests, personality tests, and skill-based assessments.
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