On Talent Assessment: is it necessary, and how long should it be?

Do you have questions about Talent Assessment? Is Talent Assessment a must? If so, what is the ideal duration of this assessment? Well, wait no more… You’ll be able to find the answers in our video below, episode twenty two of The Tea on Recruiting – our bi-weekly video series for recruiters. You’ll also find the copy attached to this episode, so you won’t miss any part of it!

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Transcript

Oh, it’s Wednesday? We need to talk about Talent Assessments tools. What are they? Should you go for them? Should you skip them altogether in favor of more structured interviews? Let’s see! Welcome back to the Tea on Recruiting, where we share insightful and thought-provoking content that can help you shape your recruiting career!

Here’s today’s first article!

The Relevance of Talent Assessment in Recruiting

It’s vital for businesses to secure the best talent for them – this is especially true in times like these when facing the costs of a bad hire can lead to serious consequences. Talent assessment tools come to the rescue, they help evaluate a candidate’s skills, aptitude, personality, perspective, to make sure they’re a good fit. They can also help you predict their future performance.

We’ve read – well, we’ve written “The Relevance of Talent Assessment in Recruiting”. Here are a few key pieces of information. The main types of talent assessment are:

Job Simulations and Work Samples: Your candidates perform job-related tasks in real-time. They’re the best predictors of future performance and let you see how your applicants think and how they handle complex situations with limited resources. Also, this helps your Candidate Experience, as they better understand what the job’s like.

Cognitive Ability Testing. Assess numerical and verbal reasoning, logic exercises, memory testing skills, attention to detail, critical thinking, problem-solving, and more. Benefits? If these tests are reliable and well-validated and you only ask for what you need, they’ll align with your DEI efforts.

Personality Tests. Gauge multiple skills and attributes like leadership, creativity, attendance, and more, and understand your candidates’ levels of conscientiousness, openness, agreeableness, extraversion, and neuroticism. These tests might make up for the impossibility of meeting the candidates for in-person interviews.

There are other assessment methods too, like: psychometric tests, behavioral tests, job-specific technical tests, and AI-powered proctoring. I don’t think I’ve ever listed so many things in a row in my life.

Are you ready for our second article?

Pre-Hire Assessment Length: How Long Is Too Long?

Now, let’s look at it from a different angle. We’ve read “Pre-Hire Assessment Length: How Long Is Too Long?”

Well, guess what, for positions with higher levels of responsibility, experience, and educational requirements, you can have candidates complete assessments running up to 45’ without them feeling frustrated or dropping out.

The trick? There’s nothing wrong with a longer assessment, just make sure that your candidates feel properly and fairly evaluated. This step in your hiring process should feel purposeful and necessary. You’re not wasting their time, you’re making sure that you can work well together. Pro tip? Gamification helps make your process more engaging.

Corvirtus’ completion rate is above 90%. They also noted that the majority of the abandonment happens the moment the candidates see the assessment. Interesting, right?

Now onto the…

CandE Crash

The more barbaric your treatment of candidates, the more demonic their reviews on the Glassdoor page. So… Remember when I said that talent assessments’ length isn’t that important? Well, maybe a 2.5-hour-long high-school-style IQ test could be overkill? The fact that it felt like an absolutely useless step didn’t help your case either.

Now, before we wrap this up, I wanted to thank Jose David Arteaga Alvarez for inspiring this episode. Naturally, there’s more left to say about Talent Assessments, and you can bet that we will! For now, we’d like to add that we do appreciate all your contributions, and if there are any subjects you’d like us to approach or dive deeper into, you can feel free to send me an email about it at elena@starred.com. You can also find me on LinkedIn and get in touch with me there. I’m looking forward to hearing from you!

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