82% of companies use candidate assessment testing, and increasingly, organizations are turning to online assessments and online assessment platforms. There are plenty of reasons for this. Not only do they help you avoid candidates who have lied on their resumes, but they are also more convenient.
When you add that online assessment helps widen your reach in terms of giving remote applicants a chance to apply more simply, it’s easy to see why online hiring assessment tests are ideal. If you’re a recruiter who wants to know more about online assessments, you’re in the right place. Continue reading to get the key facts on online assessments.
What are online assessments?
So, what are online assessments? Well, as the name indicates, online assessment involves getting your candidates to complete an assessment test online for a particular vacancy. Online assessment tests are available via online platforms. They are used by recruiters, HR personnel, and hiring managers to help them understand a candidate’s abilities in the context of the workplace.
The second you get the results after administering an assessment test online to your candidate you will also be able to discover whether they will fit well into your organization. These tests also give you an indication of the areas where your candidates need to improve.
Keep in mind that various types of candidate assessment tests are given to applicants online. From personality tests to hard skills tests, to soft skills tests, and cognitive reasoning tests, you have plenty of candidate assessment tests to choose from. You should select the test that is relevant to your organization and relevant to the role to learn more about your candidates and their abilities.
How do online assessments work?
If you’re not sure how these tests work, here’s how. Hiring assessment tests are carried out online function by asking your candidates to answer various questions via the tests. The answers your candidates provide when responding to these questions will help you better understand their seniority level. They can even be used to get an accurate estimation of how well your candidates will perform in the role.
Want to hire a website or app developer? You could administer a coding assessment test online to get a good understanding of their coding abilities. Need to hire for copywriting and editing roles? You have the option of giving your candidates an editing test to better understand their editing skills. Is your goal to hire for a marketing position? You might choose to administer an online social media assessment.
But, aside from these hard skills tests, you could ask your candidates to complete behavioral and personality tests, which work by giving them a series of questions to respond to. Typically, in tests like these, your candidates will line up their personalities to the questions asked in the test. This will give you more information on their behavior and how they will tackle tasks in the workplace.
Benefits of using online assessments
The use of online hiring assessment tests is beneficial for many reasons. As well as estimating how well your applicants will perform in the role, hiring assessment tests will let you decrease the time it takes to hire a candidate – some reduce time to hire from 42 to five days, for example. It achieves this by enabling you to avoid extensive resume scanning and instead focus on the data you receive from the online assessments.
Online hiring assessment tests are also ideal for generating discussion points for candidates you take forward to your rounds of interviews. In other words, they can form the basis of the talking points and help you ascertain even more about your candidates.
But there are other reasons why using online hiring assessment tests is beneficial. Here are some of the top 3 advantages of using online candidate assessment tests:
- Save money during the recruitment process – you will achieve this by lessening the time it takes to hire someone and keeping the costs of resources low
- Sidestep the potential to mis-hire and waste money on the wrong candidate – with an online candidate assessment you will get accurate data from all candidates and always hire the right candidate based on this information
- Avoid making the wrong decision due to biases in the hiring process – again, with accurate results, you will automatically know which applicants genuinely have the abilities you are looking for and make the right decisions, instead of hiring based on your personal feeling about a candidate
What are the issues of online assessments?
Providing your candidates with an assessment test online has various advantages. But what are the potential issues? Here are the top 3 drawbacks of an online assessment.
- For certain personality tests, there is the potential for applicants to give false responses or give responses they think suit your organization. This will give you inaccurate results and can lead to a lack of unity in your existing team with the new hire
- There’s also the potential for candidates to cheat when giving answers to some hard skills tests. This is why many skills tests are timed, and why the answers are not widely available or provided after the tests
- And given that online assessments are provided by online platforms, if you experience technical issues with the platform this can also add to the time taken to administer tests
Hiring assessment tests: simplifying recruitment hiring managers
Online hiring assessment tests make recruitment simpler for hiring managers in various ways. As well as helping you keep recruiting costs low and they can even help you predict how a candidate will perform in the role. They are changing the face of recruitment and assisting recruiters to make sound hiring decisions.
