6 Tips for Selecting the Best Technical
Assessment Tool For Your Company
The hiring process is a make-or-break part of any business operation. Not all companies have been able to develop an effective recruitment strategy that ensures HR departments and decision-makers find the most qualified people for a job. That challenge only goes up when one needs to hire technical staff such as developers, data scientists, and other high-skill positions.
Eighty-six percent of human resource professionals say that it’s hard to hire technical talent. Accordingly, it helps to know what options you have when selecting tools to help with that process. There is various HR and test management software that solve various parts of the hiring process. To keep this blog actionable, we’ll focus on technology hiring and talk about technical assessment tools. What are technical assessment tools and how do they help in the hiring process?
Technical assessment tools are often called coding assessment tools and they’re meant to help you evaluate the technical skills of the candidates in your hiring pipeline. They provide all kinds of benefits:
- Saves the hiring team’s time. It saves recruiters significant time when sifting through and assessing applicants.
- Reduces time to hire. Taking too long to hire affects your product teams’ capabilities, candidate experience, and overall employer brand. Technical assessment helps not just better hiring decisions, but faster decisions as the data are clear and it’s easy to compare a maximum of candidates.
- Gives quantifiable assessments. Tests are great ways to measure proficiency before hiring someone.
- Removes bias. When recruiting, you want to be as objective as possible. There are subconscious human biases, and even AI-based shortlisting algorithms are still found to be biased in several instances. Skill-based tests can help remove that bias and give employers concrete hiring parameters.
So what should HR professionals and recruiters look for when choosing a technical assessment solution? Here are a few tips that will help streamline the tool selection process.
1. Determine what jobs you’re hiring for
2. Consider what skills and technical requirements you need
The next step to decide on a technical assessment tool should be to define the intended outcome of technical tests. Once you know the roles you want to fill, understand the skills that translate to on-the-job excellence for those roles.
Consider a long-term perspective and answer a few imperative questions. Some of these can include:
- What skills would you want to evaluate – just technology fundamentals or a holistic assessment? Both of them work depending on your organization’s hiring culture and requirements.
- Would technology-specific skills be needed before hiring? For example, having a solid knowledge of Kubernetes, AWS, cyber security, a particular framework, etc., might not be required if you are looking to procure the tool for hiring fresh graduates.
- Do you also want to enhance the interview experience? Technical assessment platforms like Skillspace.ai offer solutions to deliver an end-to-end premium candidate experience. Generally, technical interview platforms are intended to provide interviewing essentials such as note-keeping, IDE, compiler, a question bank, video calling, and whiteboarding, all in a lucid interface. While they’re also available in the market as standalone products, if you buy them with a technical assessment platform, it will make management easier for your team and reduce costs.
More features might require you to eliminate specific tools from consideration or spend more money. In either case, you’ll be moving in the right direction if you want to adopt technical assessment platforms at your organization.
3. Know the required scale
Thanks to online assessment platforms, the organizations can now send the assessment link to the candidates across various locations simultaneously, thereby reducing the time of the recruitment process.
However, what is the scale that you need? For example, you can conduct a country-wide examination for all the university grads or evaluate just 3-4 developers every week.
The candidate will only need a computer and an internet connection to take the assessment. However, the technical assessment platform should be able to support the scale that you’re looking to test. For example, Skillspace.ai allows you to evaluate thousands of candidates at the same time.
4. Check the integrations offered and required
The last thing you want is to launch a testing software that fails because it has a bad user experience. At times, when you are operating at a large scale, your team might want to use a technical assessment software that necessarily offers integrations with collaboration software or other HR tools. At times, companies might not need any integration when most features are available within the technical assessment platforms. Before procuring a platform the integrations critical for you and see if they’re available or can be customized for you. If they’re not available, it might be a good idea to re-evaluate your need, budget, and choice of technical assessment platform.
5. Library of Questions
Nishant Das (current TA Head at Coinswitch Kuber and a former leader at Amex, Fractal Analytics, and Zeta) mentioned on Skillspace.ai’s podcast that the quality and newness of the question are of highest importance when purchasing a technical assessment platform. Often picking a tool with outdated questions with online published answers backfires as candidates start sharing their findings on social media. This kills the purpose of your online assessment and hampers your employer brand.
Most platforms offer thousands of questions in the bank. It’s more important to check the frequency at which those questions are reviewed and if the platform can prepare new high-quality questions for you if required.
6. Quality of Support
At times, recruiters or candidates may not possess technical knowledge related to the technical assessment platform. And there are some instances like university hiring where you might be testing a massive number of candidates at once. Priority support via phone call or live chat is needed in such scenarios. Before buying the platform, check if you have a similar requirement and if the tool provides it at a reasonable price.
Other Resources you might like
- Key to assessing 86% of tech candidates using automated assessment platforms | Conversation with Talent Head (India) of Dun & Bradstreet on Skillspace.ai – Read here.
- How can startups hire first set of data scientists | Conversation with VP/CTO of Juniper Networks on Skillspace.ai – Read here.
- Picking the right hiring tech-stack | Conversation with Talent Head of Meesho on Skillspace.ai – Read here.
- How to become an employer of choice | Conversation with Talent Head of Coinswitch on Skillpace.ai – Read here.
