How To Create an Assessment

Finding an assessment that works can be a challenge, but ultimately they prove to be a useful tool. Pre-employment assessments are an excellent way to expedite the hiring process and compare equally qualified candidates side by side.

However, the outcome of a single test is not always the best indicator of a candidate’s true potential. Incorporating a hiring test into your recruitment process can also be expensive and time-consuming, as you must develop, administer, and evaluate the tests yourself.

That is, unless you hire a smart pre-employment assessment firm like Klein Behavioral Science Consultants. Instead of having to create hiring tests from scratch, you’ll have access to five different types of employment tests in dozens of different styles to perfectly match your open positions.

Creating an Assessment

Today, we’ll go over the key steps you can take to create and implement the ideal hiring assessment.

1. Identify Your Prime Candidates
2. Choose an Assessment Platform
3. Administer Assessments

Identify Your Prime Candidates

First, you need to define your ideal applicant before you can design a hiring assessment that will gather the data you need from candidates.

Figure Out How to Personify the Perfect Job Applicant

Developing a candidate profile is similar to developing an ideal client avatar before launching a firm; both will help you zero in on the precise characteristics of your perfect hire.

Do they have any relevant experience or talents that might be useful to the company? How can we make sure that their transition into this role goes as smoothly as possible? What is their professional history like? Just what are they hoping to accomplish? Where do they stand out from other applicants?

This approach will aid in the development of an effective hiring exam and the improvement of the overall recruitment strategy.

Specify Necessary Abilities

Hard and soft talents are needed, and the perfect candidate will have both.

In contrast to soft skills, which can be developed through time, hard skills are absolute prerequisites for a given position, such as years of experience in a given field, minimum GPA, and specific certifications.

Interpersonal skills, communication talents, organizational prowess, problem-solving prowess, and a positive, outgoing attitude are all examples of soft skills.

Your ideal candidate should be a walking advertisement for the position you’re trying to fill. Indeed, you should be trying to reel in the best possible prospect from the very beginning of the recruitment process.

Choose an Assessment Platform

Which assessment you employ to evaluate candidates will be determined by the position you’re trying to fill. However, you must go the extra mile by selecting the appropriate format for each examination. Someone with a strong mathematical background may not fare as well on a test that calls for philosophical or critical reasoning, despite being an excellent candidate in every other respect.

For example, Klein provides five distinct types of pre-employment assessments, including everything from a general aptitude test to a measure of a candidate’s motivational fit with the company. Data from more in-depth assessments, such as those that look at a candidate’s social facilitation abilities, work values, and personality, tell a more compelling tale and paint a more complete portrait.

If you’re not sure which assessment is right for your company, Klein makes it easy to narrow your search by industry and position.

It’s tricky to get comprehensive data without resorting to exhaustive testing. Having good people analytics in place is preferable so that applicants can be evaluated in more than one way. However, if there are too many examinations, potential applicants may become discouraged and abandon the application process altogether.

Administer Assessments

Applicants to your company may expect a personalized assessment experience with Klein’s Pre-Employment Assessments.

Klein has shown the reliability of its testing, but it’s still vital to do so internally. You can use this information to determine if the candidate is a good fit for the position and how they measure up to current staff members.

In order to do this, you can have your current staff take the assessment. You can use the results as a guide to establishing your own minimum and maximum cut-off scores for weeding out candidates who don’t meet your standards.

Candidates should know that you conduct pre-employment assessments as part of your hiring procedure. You shouldn’t, however, just spring it on them.

It is helpful for many applicants to have some time to familiarize themselves with the test format and perhaps even take some practice exams.

Candidates should be informed of when and what kind of test they can expect to get in advance, rather than receiving the test itself and having little time to complete it.

Time limits for when applicants must finish the exam are crucial for keeping your recruitment on schedule.

If possible, give test takers at least three days to finish the exam after it becomes available to them (72 hours is the industry standard). Timeline elongation is at your discretion. One week is an example of a more forgiving time frame.