Talent Assessment Strategies & Methods For Recruitment

If recruiters could accurately and consistently predict the future, companies would not need talent assessment strategies because they would

Be able to predict the future performance of newly hired employees with 100% accuracy.
Have to only focus on talent development so that the company is always set up for success, and L&D budgets would be tiny.
Have to not work on replacements as turnover rates would be 0%.

However, the reality is the opposite due to complex human nature. There is a large skills gap across workforces, and insufficient talent assessments have proved ineffective in tapping into talent's potential. According to research, just 1% of executives believe that new recruits are appropriately qualified for their positions.

Excessing credentialing and discriminatory hiring practices add to the difficulty of building a suitable atmosphere for personnel to thrive and help a company grow. Businesses are continuously trying to improve decisions concerning talent to minimize the chances of bad hires (that can cost companies as much as 1.5 times the employee's annual salary) and promotions to ensure that everyone onboard is aligned with company objectives and goals.

Although it is known that making proper decisions about hiring and developing talent isn't easy, it can be significantly improved by deploying talent assessment strategies.

The benefits of adopting talent assessments are many. According to Aberdeen Group research, organizations that used talent assessments saw a "75% year-over-year drop in hiring expenditures" and a "2.5 times bigger year-over-year increase in profit per full-time equivalent" than those that did not.

Even firms that use assessments are not utilizing them to their full potential. While 55% of Aberdeen study participants used some form of assessment across the whole employee lifecycle — from pre-hire to post-hire — just 48% used assessments to evaluate workers against a set of criteria or abilities regularly.

In this blog, we will cover talent assessment strategies and recruitment methods, their importance, and how companies can use these strategies to set up their businesses for success.

What is Talent Assessment?

Talent assessments are helpful tools for workforce management, such as choosing the right candidate for a role, deciding on promotions, managing and growing team members, and understanding the workforce.

A number of assessments are used to expose numerous parts of an employee, including behaviour, personality, cognition, skills, integrity, work knowledge, and others.

Typically, talent assessment tests would analyze candidates based on two categories of criteria: suitability and eligibility.

The eligibility criteria comprise years of experience, education, skills, and talents.
The suitability criteria include abstract characteristics like motivation, interests, honesty, cultural fit, and perceived influence on team performance.

Some examples of talent assessments are:

Behavioural assessments that give a realistic representation, or pattern, of people's underlying drives and insights into their needs and actions.
Cognitive assessments that analyze a person's capacity to solve issues think on their feet, reason, and other mental qualities needed to flourish in a specific role.
Integrity assessments that examine a person's honesty, dependability, trustworthiness, and prosocial conduct.

Talent Assessment Strategies and Methods

A talent assessment process assists firms in determining if existing workers' and potential candidates' skills and expertise are a good fit for a role. Because judging a candidate's performance or a prospect's suitability for a post can be challenging, many businesses employ various talent evaluation methods and procedures.

Let's look at some talent assessment methods and strategies:

Problem-solving Assessments

Testing candidates' cognitive abilities and reasoning skills is an effective technique to determine whether they are suitable for a role. This method is inexpensive and may demonstrate individuals' intellect, understanding, and leadership abilities.

Personality Assessments

Many roles benefit from understanding applicants' mental processes and behavioural qualities. Employers can identify and analyze beneficial traits like inventiveness, attendance, and leadership alongside the attributes of other applicants. On the other hand, personality tests are ineffective as a single method of identifying a candidate's eligibility for a post and should only be used as a supplementary activity.

Structured Interviews

A structured interview strategy allows employers to ask each candidate the same questions, receive subjective responses, and acquire an idea of their experience and communication abilities. It is still the most extensively utilized talent evaluation tool, and the results are rewarding. However, combining a structured interview with another talent evaluation approach may improve hiring.

Workplace Simulation

This assessment approach is one of the most well-known. It requires an applicant to show a skill required on the job, such as delivering a sales pitch, completing an e-tray assignment, or role-playing a client meeting. This strategy can show how candidates react under pressure, predicting how they will behave on the job.

Game-based Activities

Gamification is quickly becoming the newest approach to measure talent while boosting candidates' application experience in recruiting. They help evaluate abilities such as reasoning, problem-solving, and critical thinking. Using games instead of standard "tests" makes the process more exciting and may reveal a wealth of information about candidates and their skill sets.

Assessment centres, where group work, role play, and presentations are all widely utilized to get to know candidates better, are examples of activities used in recruiting. These more engaging assignments are extremely good at demonstrating how individuals function in real-life settings, providing you with a more accurate understanding of their working style and personality before beginning a career.

Work Samples

This talent evaluation method has been demonstrated to be the most accurate in predicting job performance as it assesses the ability to do a specific task firsthand. The work sample is real work that a candidate will do and is usually connected to the position they are applying for.

Work Trial

A work trial is when a potential employee is tested before being offered a working contract. It lets businesses know the potential employee and determine how well they will manage work obligations. They give a risk-free method of assessing people in real-world settings before employment.

Work trial periods are usually mutually agreed upon beforehand and reduce the documentation required if the employer does not deem the employee in question to be job competent.

The Necessity for Talent Assessment Strategies

Talent assessments indicate a candidate's ability to accomplish the job they are being hired for. They also help you forecast whether or not a candidate will fit in with your organization's team and culture.

Here are some of the most critical advantages of talent assessments:

1. Eliminate Bad Hire Costs

The essential advantage of using a talent assessment strategy for recruiters is evading the results of a bad hire in the form of:

Recruiting costs spent on assessments, screening, selection, and other aspects of the hiring process, such as logistical expenses and technology costs.
Compensation and maintenance costs spent on salaries and perks provided to inactive personnel.
Severance costs spent on severance packages and leaving procedures.
Disturbance costs spent on reversing the cumulative disruption in teams.

2. Improve Hire Quality

Talent assessments evaluate individuals' abilities to execute in various scenarios. They provide insight into individual and team performance and how employees respond to situations such as short deadlines. They also assess job candidates based on their subject area competence.

Companies that use role-based assessments hire qualified candidates for specific job roles. They enable firms to track a candidate's development from end to end, contributing to increased hiring quality and successful recruiting, which leads to:

Increased employee retention
Increased employee engagement
Improved job satisfaction
Increased productivity levels
Reduced turnover costs

3. Eliminate Hiring Bias

Using talent assessments clarifies hiring decisions while removing personal bias. As the recruiting approach is regulated by objective analysis, gut sentiments, prejudice, and personal power are replaced.

4. Improve Onboarding

The assessments improve onboarding by increasing new hire engagement through a more effective onboarding process. This enhances productivity, turnaround time, and overall performance.

5. Provide Assessment Data for Learning and Development

Companies can link assessment data to create effective L&D programs, succession paths, variable compensation, and efficiency output.

6. Provide Managers' Assistant

Talent Assessments help managers develop a data-driven roadmap to make well-reasoned employment decisions and performance enhancements.

7. Improve in-house Talent Sourcing and Growth

Assessing your employees regularly helps an organization identify usable talent within and motivates them to strive for development to generate success and profitability. Employees with goals or learning opportunities are assets, but those without both are overhead expenses.

8. Reduce Risks

Using a competency-based strategy during recruiting assists an organization in mitigating certain risks.

9. Better Employee Evaluation

Talent assessment and management provide management with a detailed understanding of their workers' talents, career goals, growth requirements, dislikes, likes, strengths, and weaknesses. This assists in determining their motivation and other characteristics that might benefit the organization's success.

10. Improve Customer Satisfaction

Employees that undergo competency-based talent evaluations carry out their assigned responsibilities more effectively. This automatically correlates to excellent levels of service, which boosts client happiness.

Developing and Implementing Talent Assessment Programs in Your Organization

The following are the most prevalent issues that businesses face when adopting a candidate assessment framework:

They lack data because recruiters lack the processing ability to examine data and obtain meaningful insight about top employees.
They are developed in silos, are not in line with the company's aims and values, and are not done in collaboration with executives and recruiting managers.
They are not supplemented with appropriate assessment tools.

However, these can be avoided by developing and implementing a solid talent assessment framework.

Let's see how you can build one:

Determine Your Company's Objectives and Focus on the Fundamentals:

It's critical that everyone, from the top down, be on the same page about the types of personnel you want to hire and what qualifies a candidate for success.

It is hard to determine whether someone will perform well or be a good cultural fit if there is no predefined standard for what that looks like. Hold a group brainstorming session with all key stakeholders to develop a clear outline of your company's principles, culture, and the terminology you want to use when promoting employees or hiring for available roles.

If your business is experiencing workforce difficulties like high turnover rates or poor employee performance, a SWOT analysis can help companies balance their ambitions and aims. It provides a chance to examine the current work environment, employee performance, and feedback.

These methods will give you a high-level concept of what attributes employees should possess to integrate into your company's culture and value system.

Choose a Suitable Testing Method

You may utilize a variety of skill assessment tests to assess practically every aspect of your prospects (with varying degrees of success, of course). Making use of the right pre-employment tests could have a significant positive impact on your business. Research conducted by the Aberdeen Group has found that companies that use pre-hire assessment tests report a 39% lower turnover rate.

Among the most popular types of tests are:

- Cognitive ability and problem-solving tests

- Personality and psychometric tests

- Structured interviews

- Work samples and simulations

Use case: A scientific assessment approach like testing the workforce on psychometric exams reveals a candidate's personality and aptitude from the inside out. They cannot guarantee 100% certainty, but a strong probability can save time and effort. The quick analysis report assists in comprehending the reasoning behind an individual's viewpoint. As things go logically, recruiters feel less pressure.

Execute the Program and Track Results

Most talent assessments are conducted online and can most likely be integrated into your existing applicant tracking system (ATS).

This allows you to collect many data points about each candidate, which you can use to measure and compare candidates. Ensure you measure a sufficient number of diverse variables to provide depth and diversity to your data. Most ATS solutions will provide predictive analytics capabilities to assist you in processing application data and determining actionable conclusions.

The key to successfully implementing talent evaluation exams is ensuring they are all conducted consistently. Every candidate should take the same test in the same setting.

Process Results Using Predictive Analytics

Data analytics can help hiring managers with talent mapping, predicting candidates' future work performance, and focusing on what is most important at the time, improving efficiency and influencing the company's growth.

Many predictive analytics HR platforms can scan the input data and use an AI-based model to generate a meaningful output that reduces hiring costs by 70% and time by 30%.

Fill your predictive analytics platform with the KPIs you care about the most, and it will guide you on the proper path for analysis. The model supplements ATS to balance information from candidates' CVs, cover letters, skill assessments, etc. Because of this comprehensive and automated technique, you can quickly receive a complete picture overview of how well an applicant is likely to do on the job in comparison to others.

With the same data, you can also develop a visual framework for future staffing using data insights. Talent Mapping aids in planning workforce gaps and only becomes increasingly essential as a business expands.

Conclusion: Implement Robust Talent Assessment Strategies and Methods to Position Your Company for Success

It is critical to establish your goals, what a candidate will need to execute on the job, and then deploy the appropriate strategies and tools to test and evaluate your talent. Talent assessment methods may be as diverse as they are complex, but the return is a highly efficient recruiting process that can significantly increase the quality of your workforce.

They can help your business by:

Testing candidates to ascertain if they are suitable for a role. Employers can choose from a variety of tests matching their requirements.
Judging candidates' soft skills to assess how well they can adapt, how innovative and conversant they are with the business environment, and so on.
Offering insights into the job market, talent pool, and recruiting trends.
Providing talent data and interpreting the findings in connection to your team and organizational goals.
Providing statistical information to boost employee and leader awareness and chances for optimizing employees' skills inside your business.