A Guide to the Candidate Testing Processes

With technology making their presence felt across all aspects of work, candidate screening and selection processes have been on a sure-footed path to evolution over the last decade. Candidate testing is the procedure of reviewing job applications. This comes in the right after candidate sourcing and involves skimming through resumes and cover letters for finding the closest applicant-job-description matches, keeping in mind qualifications, experience, skill sets, and organization fit.

Despite significant headway in technology, testing still happens to be the most time-intensive aspect of hiring, with an average hiring decision taking about 23 hours of screening time. This is with the current size of recruitment teams of about three to four people, and they are predicted to only get smaller as more organizations pick up on the doing more with less philosophy. Another metric to keep in mind is that the best talent stays live on the market for only up to 10 days. All these numbers indicate that screening should start taking a lot less time, a lot sooner.

A 3-step guide to the screening process

The primary check conducted whether by the human eye or by artificial intelligence involves a look at the qualifications that include work experience, academic background, skills, knowledge base, personality, behavior-indicative traits, and competencies.

Ticking off the basic or must-have requirements

These are mandatory fields that the candidate must qualify in – for instance, having the legal allowance for working in the country where the role would be based or the need for basic coding skills in a website backend role. The question may arise about valuable talent being overlooked if they do not meet the essential criteria. But this can then become a debate of convenience of less time and a tight checklist over a possible oversight, and most organizations are wise to choose the former in a candidate as the market is heavily fragmented.

Scanning for preferred or good-to-have qualifications

This step involves looking at resumes that meet the basic requirements a little deeper to look for qualitative attributes that a candidate can bring to the role. These would build a stronger case for the CV since these extras would enable the candidate to do a better job. For instance, having prior experience in a warehouse of the same industry would be a bonus for a warehouse manager.

Matching the holistic picture of the candidate to the role

This is probably the first time during the screening that the recruiter looks at the candidate as more than just a CV and tries to match a more holistic employee personality (with must-have and good-to-have qualifications) to the job description. This is where candidates are shortlisted to go onward to the interviewing and testing phase. How good your candidate testing process is, has a direct impact on your recruitment conversion rates. On average, conversion rates are about 12 percent (application to interview), 17 percent (interview to offer), and 89 percent (offer to acceptance and placement). Thus, if you screened 100 candidates and shortlisted 12 of them for the interview, two would receive an offer, and hopefully one would accept.

TogglHire is an employment assessment tool that helps companies hire faster, better, and fairer with pre employment assessment tests, skills assessment tests, technical skills testing, and candidate testing (toggl.com/Candidate-Testing). To know more, visit https://toggl.com/blog/.

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