Hiring is a gamble – and the odds aren’t in your favour. Research from the Society for Human Resource Management reveals that companies only get it right 43% of the time. That’s a hiring success rate barely better than flipping a coin. The reason? Too much guesswork, gut instinct, and bias creeping into the process.
The truth is, CVs and interviews only tell you so much. Candidate quality, personality fit, and potential for success often feel like wild cards; factors that shouldn’t be left to chance.
That’s where recruitment assessments come in. These tools give you hard data to make informed hiring decisions, removing uncertainty and improving accuracy.
What is a recruitment assessment?
Recruitment assessments take a variety of forms, but fundamentally, they’re there to help you gain objective insights into a candidate and their suitability for the job. You can use them to evaluate an applicant’s hard and soft skills, competencies and even cultural fit, testing everything from personality to emotional intelligence, behavior to aptitude.
Recruitment assessments help improve your hiring accuracy by using data to make fair and objective comparisons between applicants. Now often harnessing the power of AI, they can score candidates without the bias – unconscious or otherwise – to which human assessors can be prone.
Recruitment assessments can dramatically simplify what can be a tough decision affected by a huge range of factors. They give HR teams a quick and efficient way to spot the right person for the job, enabling a structured, data-driven approach to hiring decisions that ultimately saves time and money. The result: stronger teams, better staff retention and a better fit between employee and business. Let’s dive into the benefits of recruitment assessments in more depth.
1. Improved candidate quality
Any HR team knows there’s only so much you can tell about a candidate from their CV, covering letter or application form. Though more rigorous, even an interview can only ever form a limited picture of a candidate’s true self. While these traditional methods offer insight into how an applicant perceives their own strengths, they’re ultimately self-reported, meaning they highlight what the candidate wants you to see, rather than providing an objective measure of their actual suitability for the role they’re applying for (a role they obviously won’t know as well as you!).
Enter recruitment assessment tests. These tools help filter out candidates who aren’t the right fit, allowing you to build a stronger shortlist for interview. Assessments such as personality and aptitude tests offer a data-driven view of a candidate’s potential, often serving as a highly accurate predictor of future job performance. For example, cognitive assessments measure the candidate’s ability to solve problems, think critically and learn efficiently. This provides a far more reliable indicator of their suitability than simply taking their word for it.
2. Reduced time-to-hire
Recruitment can be a lengthy process, particularly when there’s fierce competition and you’re having to wade through mountains of CVs to figure out who to invite to interview. Using a pre-employment assessment test helps speed things up considerably, with automated candidate screening tools taking the effort out of narrowing down your candidate selection. This lessens the chances that you’ll end up wasting time interviewing the wrong people.
Often powered by AI, these talent assessment tools can be set to quickly filter candidates based on criteria you select, drawing up an unbiased shortlist based on concrete data, with less potential for human error. This reduces the time you spend sifting through CVs, and therefore your time-to-hire, meaning you can find the right person for the job and get them onboarded in record time.
3. Enhanced candidate experience
Structured assessment processes and tests don’t just offer you and your recruitment team a better experience – they’re better for candidates, too. Because they remove the potential for unconscious biases that even the most impartial of recruiters may be subject to, they’re a great way to ensure that your recruitment process is fair for everyone.
Doing recruitment this way also provides a more transparent experience that reduces stress and ambiguity for applicants, giving them a clear idea of what to expect while reassuring them that their application is being treated the same as everyone else’s.
4. Better cultural fit
Arguably one of the hardest things to gauge during the recruitment process, particularly before the interview stage, a candidate’s inherent fit for your company culture has a major bearing on how successful they’re likely to be as a hire. Hiring for cultural alignment leads to better long-term performance and engagement, with employees whose personalities are a good fit for your company enjoying better job satisfaction (which spells greater retention).
You can analyse candidates for this hard-to-measure attribute with the help of behavioral assessments, using their results to draw up a pre-screened shortlist of applicants whose personality traits, communication style, values and way of working mean they’re most likely to thrive in your workplace in the long term.
5. Increased hiring accuracy
Are you finding that too many of your hires are failing to pass their probation? This may be a sign that your current recruitment process isn’t rigorous enough at matching candidates with roles. As we’ve already touched on, recruitment assessments help you increase your hiring accuracy. The data-driven insights they’ll give you will improve your decision-making and reduce hiring bias, making it much more likely that you’ll get the right person first time.
Psychometric recruitment assessments are particularly useful for predictive hiring, because they assess soft skills – essential for long-term success in a job. Indeed, according to a LinkedIn report, 89% of hiring managers say that if someone doesn’t work out in a role, it’s typically due to a lack of soft skills. Using psychometric assessments, you can spot the candidates who possess the requisite soft skills, instead of finding out the hard way, once they’ve already started in the role, that they don’t have them.
6. Improved retention
Finally, improved retention rates feed into many of the benefits we’ve already discussed here. When an employee is the right fit for their role, they’re likely to stay longer. That’s because having a job for which they’re well-suited increases their confidence and job satisfaction, as well as boosting their productivity. If your staff turnover is higher than you’d like, introducing talent assessment solutions into your recruitment process can help by spotting candidates who are a good fit for the job they’re applying for, as well as for your company culture.
Types of recruitment assessment
Recruitment assessment takes many forms and tests many different aspects of your applicants. When incorporating them into your recruitment process, you can pick and choose the tests that make most sense for the particular role you’re recruiting for. The main ones are:
Behavioral assessments
Behavioral assessments are designed to evaluate someone’s work style, decision-making and motivation. Put simply, they measure the candidate’s strengths, room to grow and preferred communication style, as well as showing you how someone sees themselves responding to various situations they might encounter in the workplace.
Personality assessments
Personality tests assess how a candidate approaches tasks and relationships in the workplace to help you ascertain whether their personality is a good fit for the role. For leadership roles, for example, a personality assessment might measure markers that identify good leaders, such as someone’s conscientiousness, adjustment, curiosity, risk approach, ambiguity acceptance and competitiveness.
Aptitude tests
Aptitude tests are the most accurate way to predict a successful hire. They measure someone’s problem-solving and learning abilities, helping you to recruit candidates who’ll adapt and learn quickly so that you can build high-performing teams. They’re a great way to spot future high performers.
Emotional intelligence assessments
Emotional intelligence tests tell you how good someone believes they are at identifying, understanding and managing their own and other people’s emotions. This is a strong predictor of a great variety of behaviors and achievements, many of which are essential to helping you gauge someone’s leadership potential and adaptability.
360-degree feedback
This one’s a little different to the previous tests in that it allows you to gain a full-circle view of a potential employee’s strengths. 360-degree feedback gives you a complete view of someone’s competencies based on constructive, anonymous feedback gathered from managers, colleagues, team members and customers. This gives you a much clearer understanding of a candidate’s performance at work, as well as their strengths and weaknesses.
Boost hiring efficiency with recruitment assessment tools
If you’re finding it challenging to hire the right person first time, or you’re looking for ways to improve your retention rates, streamlining your recruitment process is a great place to start. By introducing candidate assessments into your hiring procedures, you’ll be able to make better-informed shortlisting decisions based on objective data, removing the potential for human error and bias.
At Thomas, our scientifically validated talent assessment platform helps you spot the skills and traits someone needs to thrive in your workplace, increasing your hiring accuracy and leading to longer-term engagement and better retention rates. You can tell our platform which characteristics are most important to you, and it will help you build a job profile that should help you attract the right candidates. From there, you can invite candidates to take our assessments, and you’ll receive their personality and behavior assessment results together to help you narrow down your shortlist and make better hiring decisions.
Our range of accurate recruitment assessments help you measure candidates’ behavior, aptitude, personality and emotional intelligence. You’ll be able to compare candidates side by side, so you can easily filter out those who don’t meet the requirements for the job based on their assessment results. Our industry-leading people science is backed by the British Psychological Society (BPS), giving you the confidence that you can trust the results when making crucial hiring decisions
If you’d like to find out more about making better recruitment decisions with the help of talent assessment, get in touch with our experts or explore our recruitment tools to improve your hiring accuracy.
