Learn everything there is to know about skill assessments tests! What are skill assessment tests? How common is skill assessment testing today? What are the benefits of using skill assessment tests to evaluate both your candidates and existing employees? How to choose the best skill assessment tool?
Skill assessment tests are tests designed to help employers evaluate the skills of their job candidates and employees.
Using the skills assessment test helps companies ensure that their job candidates, as well as their current employees, have the required skills to successfully perform their jobs.
Skill assessment tests are most commonly used in the hiring process. Many employers ask their applicants to take a skill assessment test in order to narrow down their list of candidates who will be invited to a job interview.
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There are many different methods used by employers to assess their potential or existing employees’ skills.
Some of the most popular methods for assessing job candidates’ or employees’ skills are:
Resume reviews
Job interviews
Reference checks
Job simulation exercise (such as mock sales call, writing assignment, presentation, etc.)
Skill assessment tests.
High-quality skill assessment tests are the only completely standardized, formal and scientific method for evaluating the skills of employees and job candidates.
By definition, skill assessment tests have to yield a clear score, rating, description and category. This is why these tests are able to more objectively define, measure and evaluate candidates’ and employees’ skills and abilities.
Besides, comparing with the other skill assessment methods, skill assessment tests have many additional benefits.
For example, when using other skill assessment methods, you can only hear what candidates themselves (in their resumes and job interviews) or some other people (in reference checks) say about their skills.
The problem here is that your candidates and even your current employees will try to present themselves in the best possible way.
Of course, when done right, structured job interviews can be a solid predictor of job performance. Good, experienced interviewers have their ways of checking if interviewees are telling the truth (mostly by reading their candidates’ body language).
Job simulations are also quite an effective method for predicting job performance.
However, when compared with administering skill assessment tests, these two methods (conducting job interviews and applying job simulations) turn out to be more time-consuming and much more expensive.
Although skill assessment tests are around for decades, in the last few years the percentage of employers who use them has grown enormously.
Today, 82% of companies use some form of pre-employment assessment tests, according to the recent Talent Board's Candidate Experience Research report.
This is due to the scientific and technological advancement of skill assessment tools. Today, these tools are more affordable than ever, which is very convenient for employers.
Another reason why so many employers use skill assessment tests these days is because they guarantee a great candidate experience. Candidates can access and solve these skill assessment tests online from their own living room, at the time that suits them the best.
Besides being the most reliable, objective and affordable method for assessing job candidates, skill assessment tests have many additional benefits.
The Society for Human Resources (SHRM) lists the following reasons why employers use skill assessment tests:
To hire new employees,
To evaluate current employees for different roles,
To identify employees with high leadership potential,
To compare talent within an organization against industry or geographical benchmarks,
To understand talent strengths and gaps
To develop employees’ long-term value.
Skill assessment tests provide relevant information on both job applicants’ and employees’ ability to perform in the workplace.
As such, skill assessment tests are used by employers to make well-informed, data-backed decisions regarding recruitment, training, and promotion of job candidates and employees.
➡️ If you’re interested to find out more about the specific benefits of using skill assessment tests, check out our blog post: 20 Reasons to Use Skill Assessment Tests!
There are many types of so-called talent assessment, pre-employment or pre-hire assessment tests.
Here are a few examples of the most commonly used talent assessment tests:
Psychometric tests
Personality tests
General mental ability assessments
Integrity assessments
Job knowledge tests
Situational judgment tests
and skill assessment tests.
Skill assessment tests are the tests created to measure and evaluate candidates’ and employees’ skills needed for successful job performance.
Skills assessments aren’t focused on measuring knowledge (like job knowledge tests do) or personality traits (like most of psychometric and personality tests).
Skill assessment tests measure actual skills, most commonly referred to as soft skills and technical skills.
There are many different types of skill assessment test which measure different soft and technical skills. Which one you should use? That depends on the specific job position you are looking to fill and the skills needed to successfully perform in that role.
For example, are you looking for a candidate with strong communication, teamwork, public presentation, problem solving, time management, coding and programming, project management, technical writing or leadership skills?
In order to choose the right type of skill assessment test, you should first define the most relevant skills for the position you are looking to fill.
A word of advice from my own experience: People can have all the best skills, experience and job knowledge in the world, but if they are not motivated to do the job, they will never become top performers.
Another important thing: Besides hiring the right people for the job, you should also make sure you’re hiring the type of person who will fit in with your company culture. For making sure of that, you can create and conduct employee onboarding session for every new employee. With their response to the session, you can analyze their behavior and psychology towards your company culture.
Thus, when you’re evaluating a job candidate, make sure to test not only their skills, but also motivation, personality and cultural fit.
Finally, keep in mind that technical, as well as soft skills can be trained and learned.
With so many different providers and skill assessment tools in the market, it may seem quite hard to choose the best one.
In order to help you make the right decision and find the skill assessment testing tool that will perfectly fit your needs, we created this handy 5 step guide:
The first step in choosing your ideal skill assessment testing tool is to define your goals and needs.
Here are a few questions to help you get started:
Do you want to evaluate the skills of your candidates or your existing employees?
Are your goals to hire the best job candidates or to identify skill gaps in your current employees?
How many people do you plan to evaluate on a monthly and yearly basis?
The second step in choosing your ideal skill assessment tool is to define the skills you want to evaluate in your candidates or employees.
The most important question here is do you want to evaluate soft or technical skills? Or both?
Some skills assessment tools are specialized in either soft or technical assessments, but there are also those who offer a test for both soft and technical skills.
Make a list of the specific skills you want to evaluate in your employees and candidates. You’ll start your search by finding skill assessment tool that offers all the skills assessment tests you need.
Next, define the characteristics of your ideal skill assessment tool.
Here are a few questions which may help you:
Should your ideal skill assessment tool be scientifically validated?
Can your ideal skill assessment tool be integrated with your applicant tracking system (ATS)?
Does your ideal skill assessment tool offer 24×7 customer support by email or telephone?
Should your ideal skill assessment tool offer the possibility of customizing the skills tests?
Should your ideal skill assessment tool provide a great candidate experience?
You should also consider the budget constraints you have when it comes to buying a skill assessment tool.
The following step is to research the market. You’ll do that by browsing the top skill assessment test providers’ websites and comparing them against each other.
You can create a list of your desired skill assessment tool characteristics defined in the first three steps. That way, you will be able to compare different skill assessment tools much easier and faster.
➡️ To help you save time, we created a list of the most popular skill assessment tools in the market (see the list below).
Finally, take the top three skill assessment tools from your list for a test drive. Most of these tools offer a free trial or a demo, so make sure you take advantage of that possibility.
That way, you’ll be able to compare and evaluate competing skill assessment tools from first-hand experience.
Here is the list of the best skill assessment tools in the market.
All of these tools offer skill assessment tests that can be administered quickly and easily through well-designed software.
* The tools aren't listed in any particular order. Each of them is different. Read the description to find the one that best fits your needs.
At Kandio you’ll find assessment tests made from the best experts across a range of technologies. Choose assessments authored by core team JavaScripters to world-leading LinkedIn marketeers. Or everything in-between. Kandio is a strictly curated market place for experts in publishing their own assessment tests.
And they are easy on your pocket, but hard on your candidates. This is also why we have chosen to offer direct integration with Kandio from inside TalentLyft, so all our customers can get easy access to some of the strongest assessment content on the market.
eSkill is an online skills assessment solution that helps organizations deploy the most accurate, valid tests for pre-employment and skills gap assessments. You can choose from over 600 standard tests, 5000 combinable topics or create your own content for any job and industry.
Devskiller offers developer screening and online interviews in one platform. They offer a possibility to test programming languages, frameworks and libraries. With their Test Wizard, you can generate a coding test based on your job description in order to verify the coding skills you are looking for.
ThriveMap creates personalized pre-hire assessments for volume hiring. Uniquely, their assessments take candidates through a virtual "day in the life" experience of the job to test skills in real-life scenarios and ensure a fit on both sides. Their intelligent optimization engine then improved the predictive validity of your customized assessments over time.
Harver is a full suite candidate selection platform designed to enable innovative companies around the world to hire better, faster. By blending interactive assessments, predictive analytics and workflow automation, Harver enables innovative companies to digitally transform their candidate selection process.
Psycruit is an online assessment platform that enables recruiters to easily create assessment campaigns and assess candidates. Psycruit offers unrivaled flexibility, easy integrations, device responsiveness and puts candidates at the center of your recruiting.
With Interview Mocha, you can verify your candidate's job fit with our 1000+ skill tests, aptitude tests, enterprise-ready assessment platform. You can choose from a vast library of pre-built skill tests, customize one yourself or order a custom-made test specially designed for you.
The Hire Talent offers different pre-employment test solutions, including people (EQ) & logic (IQ) assessments, work personality assessments, skills assessments and sales aptitude and skills assessments.
Codility is a software platform that helps tech recruiters and hiring managers assess their candidates' skills by testing their code online. Codility generates automatically scored reports about each candidate's coding abilities, empowering the whole team to gauge technical skills.
Plum provides organizations with the data they need to make predictive talent decisions with the power of AI and Industrial/Organizational Psychology. By measuring talents such as adaptability, innovation, and communication, Plum hosts the single largest database for quantifying human potential at every stage of the employee journey – predicting successful hires and informing learning & development, strategic workforce planning, and emerging leader capability.
Xobin is an Online Assessment Platform enabling organizations to conduct Skills tests, Psychometric, and Coding Tests. Used by over 400+ teams for recruitment and training activities, Xobin serves as the world's largest white-collar skills testing platform.
Mercer Mettl is an online talent assessment platform that can help you measure your candidates’ skills, personality and ability. You can choose from their test library of the different psychometric, cognitive and technical tests or get custom tests built for your specific needs.
The Owiwi platform is a revolutionary recruitment tool that takes the shape of an interactive, immersive game. The game is designed to measure a job candidate’s soft skills. Presently, this psychometric assessment tool provides insight into a candidate/player’s following soft skills: resilience, flexibility, adaptability, decision-making, work ethic, accountability, teamwork, learning agility.
HackerEarth is the most comprehensive developer assessment software that helps companies to accurately measure the skills of developers during the recruiting process. More than 500 companies across the globe use HackerEarth to improve the quality of their engineering hires and reduce the time spent by recruiters on screening candidates.
If you're looking for a quick overview and comparison of many different skills assessment tools, we highly recommend this guide: 52 Pre-Employment Assessment Tools compared.
It will help you find your perfect skill assessment tool! 🙂
What are skill assessment tests and their purpose?
Skill assessment tests evaluate job candidates' and employees' essential skills for performance, aiding in informed recruitment and employee development decisions.
How do skill assessment tests differ from other evaluation methods?
Unlike subjective methods like interviews or resumes, skill assessment tests provide a standardized, objective measure of candidates' skills and abilities.
Why are skill assessment tests increasingly popular among employers?
They offer a reliable, objective, and cost-effective way to assess skills, ensuring a great candidate experience with the convenience of online access.
What factors should be considered when choosing a skill assessment tool?
Consider your goals, the skills to be evaluated, tool characteristics like scientific validation, integration capabilities, customer support, and budget constraints.
How can skill assessment tests be integrated into the hiring process?
Define your assessment needs, choose the right tests for the required skills, and select a tool that aligns with your hiring strategy and provides a good candidate experience.
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