According to SHRM, 79% of human resource professionals claim that scores on skill assessments are just as or more critical than traditional criteria in hiring decisions.
Every recruiter knows that traditional hiring is time-consuming and somewhat ineffective in the AI era. Traditional hiring is becoming ineffective because there are only so many ways a candidate’s skills can be measured in person. With that in mind, it should also be noted that a candidate may or may not feel comfortable applying for a position that has a hectic traditional hiring process. So, how do you improve the candidate experience and keep the hiring process streamlined simultaneously?
Simple. By using skill assessments. In this blog, we will look at how candidate experience affects your organization and how skill assessments can improve overall candidate experience from end to end.
Understanding the value of candidate experience
Candidate experience is vital when it comes to the reputation of the organization. Improving or maintaining a proper candidate experience can improve the organization’s goodwill and attract highly skilled, diverse people to apply for open positions.
Let’s look at it this way: if a candidate applies for an open position at your organization and goes through a friendly, professional, and appropriate hiring process. Then, regardless of their final application status, they will recommend or review your company with good words.
Now if the hiring process were to go the exact opposite way, then the candidate would not keep any further relationship with the company and discourage every other person from their network to not be a part of the organization.
In short, improving the candidate experience is very important and necessary nowadays. It can only be done if the hiring process uses a remote skills assessment platform such as Testlify. That comes with 100+ ATS integrations, so you never have to worry about inviting candidates to our talent assessment platform.
Improving the candidate experience with skill assessments
Skill assessments are pre-filled “candidate experience improving” checklists. That means skill assessments are built to satisfy the candidate and their assessment process. Generally, skill assessment platforms help improve the candidate experience by enabling these 5 features in the assessment process:
Signifying employer brand
Skill assessment platforms such as Testlify offer white-label features. That enables the organizations to put their logo and domain in the invitation link directly. Other than that Testlify also offers multilingual assessment features and anti-cheating features. Depending on the size of the pre-established employee brand, this step will solidify the employer brand more and make candidates feel authentic about the whole assessment process.
Diverse and inclusive for everyone
The unemployment rate is higher among Black and Hispanic communities in the U.S., according to a study published by the U.S Department of Labor. This is generally because of the prejudices that racial minorities hold. But, with skill assessments, recruiters can get past the unconscious bias and hire people for their skills and not for their racial identity.
Multilingual access
According to the U.S. Census, over 35.8 million Mexicans in the United States speak Spanish as their native language. This is why having a bilingual hiring process improves the candidate experience. Computerized test skill assessments can offer multilingual support to enhance the candidate experience. Testlify even offers test instructions in up to 9 languages, including English, Spanish, and Chinese.
Remote assessments
Hiring global talent has never been easy, but now, with remote skill assessment tools like Testlify, recruiters can create an assessment, share the link with the candidates, and wait until the candidate takes the test. After that, depending on the test report, the recruiter must decide if the candidate will be discarded or moved further with assessments. This assessment system improves the candidate experience because they can take the assessment directly from anywhere they wish rather than traveling to a physical place.
Anti cheating measures
Now, with remote skill assessments, detect every dishonest activity happening during an online assessment, from turning off full-screen mode to taking the cursor off the assessment tab to disallowing camera access.
Pro tip: Hiring a diverse group of people can improve your team’s overall problem-solving skills with their different knowledge of different cultural practices.
Also Read : How to use skills assessment to find high-potential candidates.
Getting the candidate experience feedback
After the assessment, it’s time to determine how candidates feel about the skills assessment process. However, there are many ways to do it. For example, reach out to candidates on LinkedIn or send them a feedback form via email or others. But in this section, we will discuss doing it via online meeting.
Online one-on-one meetups with rejected candidates may not sound like a good idea. Still, we assure you that it is one of the best ways to gather feedback from candidates regarding their assessment process experience. It is not even time-consuming if you can allot 2 to 3 minutes per candidate. And within an hour, you could get up to 20 feedbacks from 20 candidates.
You can ask questions such as:
- Was there any question in particular that you found complicated in the skill assessment?
- Imagine if there was no time limit; could you have performed better?
- Was the skill assessment lacking any feature that’s important?
- How would you rate your candidate experience on a scale of 1 to 10? (Where one is poor and 10 is excellent)
Pro tip: Assess hundreds of candidates immediately with a skills assessment platform like Testlify to save time on resume verification and background checks.
Implementing the candidate experience feedback
After getting the feedback from the candidates, it’s time for you to analyze the input and see if there’s any particular problem they collectively faced. If the issue is found, it must be directly reported to the customer support team at the talent assessment platform. Testlify offers 16 hours of chat and email support throughout the day. So feel free to reach out regarding any problem your team faces while using our product.
Conclusion
Improving candidate experience is essential for the organization’s goodwill in the long run. And traditional hiring is not very helpful in achieving this goal. This is why, after integrating skill assessments into your hiring process, you can retain top talent and improve the candidate experience with all the above features.
Choose Testlify: the best talent assessment tool for all your recruitment needs. With over 1400+ on-the-job skill tests, you can hire for any role you can think of. Sign up for free a trial and check out our prices and test library. Wanna get a closer look? Book a demo call with us right now.