The business world is moving at a fast pace, giving us all these different tools to help us in our business in so many different ways. The same is true in the world of recruitment and in the last 5 years alone how companies hire employees is drastically different today.
We don’t post in a newspaper anymore-some candidates submit a video as part of their application to a role! Candidates themselves have access to a lot more information than they used to. Today it’s so easy for them to Google interview questions and how to answer them, and they can even look up specific questions that could be asked for a specific role they have applied for.
So as a business owner hiring employees for your business, how can you ensure that a candidate is answering those questions of yours genuinely or did they Google it? One tool that you can use are assessments. You can use personality assessments as a tool in the process that sees what kind of candidate you are looking at. Some personality assessments even have the ability to have the job description be assessed, thus allowing you to know what kind of profile fits that particular position.
If you research using personality tests as part of the recruitment process you will find articles that are in favor of it, and others that are critical of their validity and how they can be faked by candidates. Yes that can happen, but we suggest that when you are researching an assessment we recommend you look into the report you receive after a candidate completes the assessment.
What you want to look for is how thorough the report is-does it go into detail about the person’s results, and most importantly does it give you probing questions to ask in an interview. When MKS HR uses personality tests during the recruitment process we get a candidate to complete it before we move them to the face to face interview stage. This way we can use the probing questions from candidate’s report to dig deeper into a certain area.
Other assessments that you can use during the recruitment process are to test a candidate’s skill level to see if they can do the actual job. You may be thinking about typing tests here, which is a great example, but today there are many tests out there to assess almost any skill. For instance if you have an IT developer role, you can test to see how experienced they are in that area. You can test to see their knowledge level of any MS Office suite of programs.
The most important thing to remember about using personality or skills assessments is that you can’t use them as a standalone tool in the recruitment process. At MKS HR we can’t stress enough to use these assessments in conjunction with other employee screening techniques such as behavioural interviews and employment reference checking. When all of these are used together then it will give you a more complete picture of the candidate’s characteristics than if you only used an assessment.
You are probably asking what are the most commonly used personality assessments? Or where can I find some good skill assessments to use? Look no further than here because as always we know that your time is precious to do some basic research on your own.
So we have put together the MKS HR Guide to Personality & Skills Assessments.
We have done some of the basic research for you and listed out the most commonly used personality assessments along with a list of possible skills assessments and the respective companies you can look at for those tests.
Click here to download your free guide!
Need help still? Feeling overwhelmed? Click here to book a complimentary Discovery Call with MKS HR.