A well-designed skills test can help you distinguish between top candidates and make the right hiring decision by confirming your candidates’ abilities.
So, you’ve formulated a great shortlist, determined a group of promising candidates from your initial interviews, and completed face-to-face interviews. What’s the final step to ensure you’ve truly selected the best person for the role?
Skills testing is the last piece of the puzzle. This process is an effective way to assess the skill levels of applicants across a range of sectors that are important to your organisation. You can reduce your talent pool to only the most qualified candidates against your hiring benchmarks. Most importantly, it helps you to make the right hiring decision by confirming your candidates’ abilities and allowing you to create benchmarks and comparisons.
Skills tests differ to general mental agility tests, in that you are testing for specific skills, such as data entry and administration, web development, literacy and numeracy, and more. You can even test for leadership skills, attention to detail, time management, business communications, retail knowledge, warehousing skills… the list goes on!
Well-designed skills tests provide accurate measurements of candidates’ abilities and immediate insights to inform your decision-making. (A Microsoft Office test will reveal candidates’ competency in… you guessed it, Microsoft Office!).
It’s best to conduct skills testing in the final stages after face-to-face interviews when you’ve narrowed your candidate pool down, as it comes with a price tag. Use the investment as a final decision maker.
Most organisations will benefit from skills testing. The only exception is organisations that rely on more hands-on roles, such as trades. Depending on your role, you can usually test up to four skills, depending on your role requirements. Ensure you choose the right skills test for your role!
To incorporate skills testing into your recruitment, depending on your budget and resources, there are a number of skills testing software options available for purchase. A better option may be to outsource your testing by engaging an external recruitment specialist with skills testing resources. Specialists who provide the software, supervision (if required), and fast turnaround can interpret results and help you hire the right candidate sooner.
Skills tests are usually unsupervised through a testing program. While you can provide candidates with a deadline, they can usually complete it in their own time.
If there are different levels to the skills test, the test should become more difficult as participants progress.
Adapt your skills test based on your organisation’s needs. For example, you may be interested in testing for competency specifically in accounting and finance, digital development, or engineering and design. Or, you may like to test for a number of skills at once, such as computer competency, communication skills, and time management.
Well-designed skills tests need to produce reliable and consistent results. (You can test this by assigning a test participant to complete it twice at different intervals. Their performance results should be reasonably similar, making allowances for the effects of them having had some practice. If the results are wildly different, the test is not well designed. This could be due to allowing participants to take too many chances, use trial and error, or allow too little or too much time for responses (although not all tests are timed!). Not all skills tests are flawless. Any test you use should be developed for your organisation’s requirements.
If you engage a recruitment specialist, they will be able to take you through a demonstration of the questions that will be asked, and show you example results reports. Reports should demonstrate candidates’ strengths and areas for development, and allow you to compare candidates.
Your skills test should not discriminate based on anything other than participants’ ability to apply the skills being tested.
Skills tests are an excellent strategy to inform your final hiring decision to ensure you truly are bringing the best person onboard. Determine what skills you would like to test for (relevant to each role), engage an external specialist, measure results, and compare candidates to make that final decision easier.
Does your organisation use skills tests? How have they helped you? Share a comment to let us know.
Further reading
Employment Office