Talent Assessment Methods For Recruiting Qualified Candidates

What are talent assessment methods?

Talent assessment methods are key to understanding an individual's abilities and potential. Recruiting qualified candidates is a complicated process – but the use of additional talent assessment methods can help to make the decision easier.

The traditional recruitment process might not always be enough to make sure that you get the most qualified candidate for the role, so testing more 'soft skills' through tests like psychometric assessments provides more data on each person.

5 Talent Assessment Methods For Effective Recruiting

There are lots of talent assessment methods you can use to help improve your recruitment process, meaning it can be difficult to know what will benefit you the most.

This guide goes over the five most popular methods for recruiting candidates and how effective they are at helping you select the most qualified.

1. Skills, Situational And Problem-Solving Tests

One of the most effective selection assessment methods is using aptitude tests, which is also one of the most popular and easiest to implement into your recruitment process.

Aptitude tests (also known as psychometric tests) help to gauge certain skills which are more difficult to assess during traditional recruitment methods like interviews or cover letters.

Among the most widely used are verbal reasoning and numerical reasoning, situational judgement tests and personality tests, all of which can add to a candidate's profile and give you an in-depth view of their skills.

If you are looking for traits like working under pressure, creative thinking and general logic skills, these are harder to determine pre-employment. Therefore, adding skills and problem solving tests can be an effective way of predicting how an employee will perform on the job.

2. Games And Activities

Gamification is growing rapidly in recruitment as the newest way to assess talent, while also improving your candidates' application experience.

Similar to psychometric and skill testing, gaming tasks and activities can be used to assess skills like logic, problem-solving, and critical thinking. By using games instead of traditional 'tests', the process becomes more engaging and can provide a lot of important data about candidates and their skill sets.

Other activities that can be used in recruitment are more established methods like assessment centres where group tasks, role play, and presentations are all commonly used to get to know candidates better. These more engaging tasks are highly effective at showing how people perform in real-life situations, which gives you a more accurate insight into their working style and personality before they start on the job.

3. Personality And Cultural Fit

Something that is becoming increasingly recognised as an important factor of employment is the working environment, and whether someone is a good fit for the job and the company personality-wise. While personality tests are not a sufficient basis for hiring decisions by themselves, they can be very helpful when used in conjunction with other recruitment tools.

Personality tests can give more information on someone's general demeanour, particularly regarding the 'big five' personality traits, also known as OCEAN:

• Openness to experiences
• Conscientiousness
• Extraversion
• Agreeableness
• Neuroticism

These can tell you a lot about someone's leadership potential, how well they work in a team, and what kind of environment they might thrive in – making it easier to find someone compatible with your company's culture.

4. Structured Interviews

There are still a lot of benefits from traditional candidate recruitment methods, like structured interviews. While there is a trend towards more unstructured and casual interviewing techniques, research has found that structured interviews can be around twice as effective at predicting job performance.

Following a list of predetermined questions can make the interview more impartial, since it gives every candidate equal opportunity by asking them the same questions.

While they can be thought of as impersonal, structured interviews create a fairer experience for candidates and recruiters. Keeping the questions the same across the board means that every candidate is assessed on the same parameters, which reduces the risk for recruitment bias and ensures that all interviews are legally compliant.

A modern example of structured interviews also includes asynchronous interviews, which are recorded by the candidate and evaluated later. These platforms often offer AI technology as an additional screening tool. For example, face-scanning applications can assess body language, tone of voice, and vocabulary to rank the most qualified candidates.

5. Work Simulation

This method of assessment is one of the most well-known, so you probably already use it in some capacity. Work simulation is simply asking a candidate to demonstrate a skill expected of them on the job, such as asking them to deliver a sales pitch, complete an e-tray task, or role play a meeting with a client.

Using this method allows you to see how a candidate responds to pressure, which can be a strong indicator of what they will be like on the job.

Free Talent Assessment Tools

There are different kinds of candidate screening tools available to suit your needs. Most of the popular providers offer a free trial of their product, which means you can try a limited version of their service. We offer a trial of our recruitment platform, which handles assessments, interviews, and talent analysis.

Building Great Teams

Finding the best talent for your team is always going to be a difficult process, but using different assessment methods can help fill data gaps and generally improve your decision-making.

Recruitment tools can help identify what makes a great team and help you effectively find the best person for the job, providing more information, and making the process more enjoyable and engaging for everyone.