6 Effective Ways to Assess Candidates Apart from Interviews (5 mins Read)
The most common method to select a candidate for a specific job is an interview. However, if you have to select the perfect fit only a brief interview is not enough to find out the actual potential of a candidate. In order to gauge the actual potential there are various other methods of selection process apart from the interviews. But, how can we know which employee selection process will be most effective in the recruitment process apart from the interviews? We’ll discuss in detail on the other methods that you can use in the hiring process to select the perfect candidate in lesser time and who will be more aligned with your company culture and goals.
1. Assess the cognitive ability of the candidate
Cognitive ability is the number one predictor of a job performance across all the employment levels and for all the industries. The assessments for cognitive ability is a sort of pre-employment testing used to find out how well the candidate uses the wide range of mental processes, such as abstract thinking, working with numbers, problem-solving, reading comprehension and their learning agility. The cognitive skills assessment is one of the highly effective methods for predicting the job success. Hence, in order to measure the cognitive skills of the candidate properly, you have to develop a good cognitive assessment module.
2. Evaluating the learning agility
Evaluating the learning agility of the candidate is another effective selection method to build onto the recruiting process. What exactly is learning agility?
Learning agility is the ability to be in a new situation which one doesn’t know how to handle and then figuring it out anyway and finding out the correct way to handle the situation. An agile learner can always apply his or her past learnings to the new scenarios that can crop up anytime in their career. It’s a crucial ability that you need to measure to gain a true understanding of how the applicants will function and adapt in the ever evolving work environment. So, you need to develop a well constructed, reliable assessment for gauging the learning agility of the candidates.
3. Conduct situational judgement tests or SJT
Another great way to do the perfect employee selection is to assess their situational judgement capabilities. Situational Judgement Tests (SJT) present the candidates with various situations that they might experience during their if they’re selected for a specific role they’re applying for. This type of pre-employment assessments ask the candidate to choose the best and the worst way to handle a particular job situation.
The scenarios are very strategically chosen in collaboration with the recruitment or talent acquisition team to illustrate the critical situations that an employee might have to deal with once hired. These hiring tests assess how well the applicants prioritize the client inquiries, follow the instructions and handle the situations that crop up in the workplace. These tests are highly predictive of the job performance and culture fit and can provide candidates with a realistic job preview early on in the application process.
4. Measure the employee integrity
You need to hire honest and reliable employees for your company—but how exactly do you measure that? The employee integrity tests allow you to collect the insights about the candidates’ honesty, dependability and the work ethic. The integrity of a candidate and other relevant soft skills are usually assessed by a digitally developed personality questionnaire.
5. Organize an assessment center
The assessment centers allow employers to measure the candidates’ hard and soft skills. Rather than the places that candidates go to take a specific test, in this context an assessment center refers to a testing process which analyzes each candidate’s communication skills as well as their social, analytical skills.
These tests consist of various simulations and exercises which are designed to evaluate how an individual would perform in real on-the-job scenarios. This approach helps the recruiters and the hiring managers make fully informed hiring decisions. Moreover, it provides the candidates with a clear picture of the realities of the job which they’re applying for.
6. Test the job knowledge
Does the candidate have the actual knowledge which is required to do the specific job?
While most of the time that knowledge can be acquired on the job and there are other factors too which are more important, but there are certain roles which require the applicants to already possess the specific job knowledge and skills before they are selected. Different job family require a different skill assessment; however, some skills like typing, multitasking and language proficiency can be useful across all roles and industries.
Conclusion: An employee selection process is a unique process as an organization itself. Different companies may have different selection process. So, the best format for your company depends on many things like your company culture, values and goals. You need to choose the best selection methods which will be most reliable, predictive and best suited for your company and the roles you need to hire for. There is no need to rely on only one particular method to make your decision, instead, you can build on a combination of different selection methods which suits the role and the company best to select a perfect FIT at the end of the day.
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