One of the important ways to assess new candidates and enable the growth of current employees is through skill surveys. Skills surveys allow your company to identify the most important areas of improvement in your employees and allow you to identify the best candidates from a pool of applicants.

In turn, skill surveys can improve the employee experience, candidate experience, and quality of hire. Below we’ll get into how to do skill assessment surveys, skill assessments interviews, and recruitment skills assessments. 

What Is a Skill Survey or a Recruitment Assessment?

A skill survey or recruitment assessment is a list of questions or tasks asked to a candidate, so they can demonstrate their skills, capabilities, and expertise. 

Traditionally, these have taken the form of interview questions where a hiring manager evaluates the competency of an application during the hiring process. Today, modern analytics technologies have expanded hiring teams’ capabilities in offering surveys and assessments. Skills surveys and recruitment assessments can in the forms of:

• Reference checks 
• Self-reference score comparisons
• Skills tests
• In-person interviews 

Soft vs Hard Skill Surveys

There’s no argument that soft skills and hard skills are both imperative for new hires expected to work in a team environment. Whether you’re looking at sales, tech, marketing, managers, logistics, or any other role, most employees need both sets of skills to be effective at what they do. 

Soft and hard skills surveys don’t differ much in the way they’re presented. Digital reference checks can easily assess the technical aspects of a candidate’s former role as well their soft skills. It’s really up to you as a hiring leader or manager to narrow in on what kind of skills you want to assess.

Why are Recruitment Skill Survey Assessments Important During Hiring?

Believe it or not, studies have shown that nearly 80 percent of applicants lie on their applications, which is why it's imperative to take advantage of all your hiring tools, including skills surveys. 

A well developed skill survey provides hiring managers with more information and data to make an informed hiring decision to objectively measure competing candidates. 

Benefits of skill surveys

• Takes the guesswork out of the process through a more meticulous way of predicting employee performance than resumes or traditional interviews. 
• Helps minimize the margin of error of employing an unsuitable candidate.
• Minimizes cost associated with attrition and turnovers as hiring managers can understand candidate competency better.
• Quickens the hiring process altogether by making the filtering through applications easy. 
• Enables diversity hiring by focusing on skills like innovation and enterprise which intern improves the profits. 

How to Conduct a Skills Survey Assessment During the Hiring Process

There are a number of ways to conduct skills surveys assessments during the hiring process; below we’ll break down some of the most common and effective ways to do so. 

Pre-employment reference skill survey

Pre-employment reference checks are one of the most reliable to assess the hard skills, soft skills, integrity, expertise, experience, and much more. Asking previous managers direct and specific questions allows the hiring manager to have a deeper insight into the candidates profile with confidence. You can also verify and validate parts of a candidate’s resume and CV, helping you to identify honest or dishonest candidates. 

Behavioral-based skills questionnaire

Behavioral-based skills questionnaire makes sure that the recruiters can assess not only the candidates competency of finishing a task but also how they behave during the process. These questions can be asked during the interview process as well as during the reference check. 

Skills Surveys and Tests

Skills Surveys and tests are specifically created to evaluate the proficiency of the candidate in order to fulfill the requirements of the role that they are being hired for. These could include surveys, questionnaires, activities or tasks that show the suitability of the candidates skills to the job portfolio. 

Tips for Running a Skills Survey Reference Checks as Part of the Interview Process

Knowing when to utilize a skill survey

A skill survey can be done during any stage of the recruitment. It should essentially be a part of the interview process. The survey can help in reducing the risk of finding out too late that the candidate lacks the skills they claim to have.  

Utilizing automated reference skill surveys and checks

Manual reference checks are slow, tedious, subjective, and ineffective. Automated reference checks will help you aggregate candidate skills, past performance, strengths and weaknesses, and much more in a matter of days. You can have a full reference check report within 48 hours and benefit from self reference comparisons to see how candidates match up with their reference scores. 

How Crosschq Can Help Conduct and Automate a Skill Survey for Your Recruitment Team

Ensuring that the recruitment process is smooth and effective for both employers and potential employees will save you time, energy, and money. Crosschq’s skill surveys, which include automated reference check technology, can help your company nail the best candidate for the job in the quickest time possible. With Crosschq, you get the best of both worlds regarding time and quality. 

Crosschq’s “Q” Report looked at 24+ million pre-hire and post-hire decisions we’ve helped leaders make, along with the radical insights from those data points that can help you hire, retain, and develop talent. Sign up for a demo today to learn how Crosschq can help you land quality hires.