Believe it or not, nearly 75% of companies admit to having hired the wrong candidate for a role, and each of those bad hires costs those organizations $15,000 on average.
Having a reliable employee skills assessment test in place can help you avoid bad hires, identify critical skills in candidates, and improve your overall hiring process and quality of hire. In order to benefit from an employee skills assessment, you need to know what to test for, when to test candidates, and how to use your skills assessment results to make smarter hiring decisions.
And that’s why we’re here. Below we’ll cover everything you need to know about employee skills assessments to improve your hiring process and boost your quality of hire.
Employee skills assessments are used to measure and test the suitability, skill level, and fit between a candidate and an open position. Employee skills assessments cover a broad range of skills and capabilities, including hard skills, soft skills, personality style, experience, knowledge, technical skills, social skills, and other important factors relevant to a position.
Employee skills assessments are just one part of a multi-pronged hiring approach. Employee assessments should be used in conjunction with reference checks, interviews, data-driven performance indicators, quality of hire analytics, and other pre-hire tools. You can use the following employee skills assessments to assess the efficacy and experience level of candidates: cognitive skills test, EQ test, 360 digital reference check, work sample test, job knowledge test, learning agility assessment, and more.
Refer to the following steps when implementing your employee skills assessment:
Skills assessments aren’t an all-in-one solution to finding you the best hires, but they are one valuable piece of the puzzle.
When you can leverage data to identify correlations between skill sets and new-hire performance, you’ll be able to proactively identify which skills tend to yield the best hires. With Crosschq, our quality of hire analytics will help you correlate competencies, candidate skills, education, and prior work experience to predict the likelihood of new hires becoming high-impact team members.
Here are some other findings from an SHRM study of nearly 1,700 hiring professionals.
You should test for what is relevant to your role. Siloed and highly technical roles will require a greater emphasis on hard skills, and managerial or team-oriented positions will require more soft skills and communication capabilities.
Here are some common tests you can leverage:
You can test for a variety of skills with the following test template structures.
Questions |
Strongly agree |
Agree |
Neutral |
Disagree |
Strongly disagree |
I think some level of conflict is necessary to achieve results in a team |
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It’s easy for me to stay calm under pressure |
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I find it difficult to know how others around me are feeling |
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I am continuously grateful for the life that I have |
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I try to see things from others’ perspectives, even if I know they’re wrong |
Crosschq allows you to leverage a set of templated questions or create your own custom-made test questions, so you have the convenience and flexibility to create the best employee skills assessments for your needs.
Employee skills assessments are excellent ways to measure suitability and build data for long-term growth. Crosschq’s employee skills assessments and 360 digital reference checks will help you find better candidates in less time, providing you with a more equitable, efficient, and cost-effective way to find quality hires.
Learn more about how you can leverage employee skills assessments and other important aspects of the hiring process with the Crosschq demo today.