Over the past years, organizations are seeing a major lack of talent that hinders the growth of companies. It has become more difficult than ever to attract the right kind of talent. Hence, making talent assessments is one way to attract top talent.
In this blog, we will be talking about why and how you should build excellent talent assessments that will help you and your industry grow.
What is talent assessment?
Talent assessment means analyzing the skills, knowledge, cognitive qualities, and personality traits of an employee or candidate to see if they are an appropriate fit.
This can be used for the following:
- Can be done as a pre-employment test to judge the employee’s caliber
- Shifting the roles of an existing employee
- To judge the performance for appraisal
- For employee training and development
You can complete the assessment through online quizzes, face-to-face interviews, work samples, etc. And it depends on the role and requirements of the company.
You can find the following tests as the most common talent assessments:
- Sales skills assessment
- Psychographic tests
- Communication skills assignments
- Assessment of management skills
These assessments help employers determine their best talent and whether they will be suitable for a particular job role. This makes it easy for them to calculate the efficiency and productivity they can bring to the organization.
Why do you need a functional talent assessment?
Irrespective of your company’s domain or size, talent assessment tools help you acquire the best candidate that will assist your company in reaching heights. So, let us go over why you need an effective talent assessment in greater detail.
1. You can get the best talent!
You must conduct a streamlined and data-driven talent assessment that will help you hire the right fit for the role. Making these assessment tools is a great way of analyzing the candidates’ skills and also building trust for future performance.
2. Bad hiring is expensive!
Onboarding and retaining an employee are expensive, and wrong hiring can cost you a fortune. The undercover recruiter stated that hiring someone for the position of the second manager can cost you around $840,000, which is an insanely big amount. To help your company save money, it becomes necessary to curate tests that will filter out the best talents.
These mistakes are continuous and often have some major reasons behind them, including:
- Candidates lying about their qualifications or career
- The urgent need of filling the role
- Not focusing on the candidate’s personality and attitude
Creating an effective talent assessment will help you avoid all these pitfalls and also select the best candidate.
3. Save your resources!
When you hire a new candidate, obviously he or she has to be trained as per the job requirements. Training the employees back and forth will burn through your resources. Hence, to save on the costs of new hiring and training, you must select the best talent based on the assessment.
The assessment can also indicate the skills gaps of an employee that needs to be filled during the training.
4. Helps in hiring on a larger scale!
With the help of a streamlined talent assessment, it becomes relatively easier it hires people on a scale. If you are hiring for a low scale, you may get away without any kind of talent assessment.
But when hiring on a large scale, you must have a definite talent assessment so that you do not make any mistakes and fill the positions fast.
5. Increase workplace diversity
The companies following workplace diversity give certain advantages to them like:
- They are more likely to become innovation leaders
- They are also more accepted by their fellow teammates
- Diverse teams make better decisions
Setting up talent assessments to select the talent will help maintain diversity as it minimizes the risk of human error. Meaning the subconscious bias that sometimes people make while selecting any candidate. The selection will be purely based on skills and talent.
6. Culture fit
An effective talent assessment will ensure that you are hiring the right talent for your company in all aspects other than just skills. It helps you select candidates who are culturally right fit for your organization.
You must analyze the behavior of the employees too because a bad selection will soon become disengaged and may also try to harm the company.
7. Improve onboarding
Onboarding plays an important role in retaining your employees. Many external research resources have told us how improving your onboarding process can help retain employees better.
You can apply the talent assessment for the onboarding process in ways like:
- You can utilize the talent assessment to personalize the onboarding experience for the candidates.
- You can determine any requirements of the candidate beforehand with the help of these talent assessments.
- You can easily plan your future requirements which will help you make the arrangements beforehand.
8. Upskilling your employees:
If you are planning to give training to your employees but are not sure of who requires upskilling, this talent assessment can help you with that.
You can ask your employees to take the assessments and see who lacks a particular skill to determine what training will be helpful for them.
It will also help the employees determine their strengths and weaknesses so they can work on them accordingly.
You can add one-to-one interviews or feedback forms to determine what your employees require at any given moment.
You can give them the courses such as:
- Leadership courses
- Time management courses
- Communication skills training
- Data Analytics
The courses can be dependent on your company’s requirements and the goals your employees are seeking.
Different tests you can have?
1. Personality test
There are separate personality tests for the employees that will help the organizations to know the candidate better and if the job role suits him. Make sure your test is consistent with the company’s requirements and valid for each job role.
2. Cognitive tests
Further, there can be cognitive tests as well that will help you give each candidate a suitable role. There can be tests such as:
- Logical reasoning
- Critical thinking
- Abstract reasoning
- Verbal aptitude
3. Work sample assessment
Though basic, it might be the best way to analyze a candidate. Often companies take it as the first step of evaluation that will help them analyze the knowledge of an employee of the job role and industry.
Hence, with the right talent assessment you can easily find out the best talent for your organization and that will help you enhance your productivity.
