How seasoned hiring teams assess 86% of their applicants to hire the best developers in short successions?
Automated technical assessments are among the most recent job-specific testing modalities that have entered the scene in recent years. Nowadays, they are used as an effective tool in the selection and recruitment process as they enable companies to improve the efficacy of their recruitment processes. Through technical assessment platforms like Skillspace.ai, companies can hire technical talent purely based on skills and optimize their time spent in resume screening or interviewing the wrong set of candidates.
However, the main problem with most of these platforms is that the candidates are hesitant to take them given the skewed supply-demand during the ongoing Great Resignation. Hence, these platforms fall into disuse for many first-time adopters. This blog will look at the main factors leading to this and what we can do to make these platforms more inviting for candidates?
During one of our recent episodes of Hiring Diaries, we interviewed Vishwanadh Raju, the Head of Talent at Dun & Bradstreet India and a former HR leader at AXISCADES, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo. Since it was all about having the right candidate screening strategies for technology hiring, we considered asking him about the problem statement of reducing funnel attrition in technology hiring assessments.
Mudit Srivastava, Host, Skillspace.ai:
When we speak to companies, they often talk of massive churn occurring at the start of the process itself. Okay, let’s say that technical assessments platforms like Skillspace.ai and its likes help in casting a wider net. But if a recruiter is sending tests to 100 people and only 20-30% of them are taking it, attrition in the first step of the hiring funnel does seem concerning many instances. Can you suggest a way to handle it? What can be done to make these assessments more interesting for candidates? Ultimately, as you stated earlier, it’s in the recruiters’ interest to have their candidates assessed via these tools.
Vishwanadh Raju, Dun & Bradstreet:
So I would go back to the example of a Flipkart where 100 people log in to their website that day, and only 10 People are buying the product, which means 90 people did not accept the outcome, right. Similarly, if I have sent ten assessments, only one person is taking the test; why are these nine people are not taking the test? That is where we start. So if you start looking at that, we’ll slowly understand the pattern.
In our case, we have an exciting 30 minutes conversation kind of thing happening, where we say that this is why we are doing it. And this is how you will work with us. And these are the kinds of similar problem statements that you will work on. And we would want to understand your ability to code, which can become the process, and then we make them know.
And then we saw that after doing that activity earlier, it used to be just one email that goes out, and now there is a call going out to explain the importance of taking the test.
That’s something we’re doing, and it’s working really well for us. I’m very sure that we can at least look at 86% of the people taking our assessments test.
My still problem is people are not clearing the test. I made people write the assessment. But finally, they’re not passing the required scores. Then, I went back to the teams and asked, is our assessment very high-end? If I had to look at somebody internally, would that person also clear this test? As a result, I think we should also consider the benchmarking aspect. It’s pointless to set a high bar if nobody is clearing the test. I think we usually spend a lot of time on this. My leaders sometimes join me in explaining our goals to this prospect in order to make them understand why we are doing what we are doing. And we have seen a good result there.
Another is from the assessment platform standpoint, it has to be perfect UI, and it has to have a catchy way of looking at it. Many candidates don’t want to get into a boring platform, which is just as what is required. And also some interactive suggestions that could give me some ability to think differently, and intelligent messages also pop up because hyper-personalization is a way of looking at it.
Mudit Srivastava, Host, Skillspace.ai:
Yeah, I think it’s a significant input that you mentioned. And I think we made a post on this very recently. A report by Kelly Services report said that if the candidate experience is good, the probability of somebody coming back is somewhere around 95% or so. And I think this was the report, as I recall, it’s such a fascinating number, and this is exactly what you pointed out with a bit more practical pointers on top of it.
Vishwanadh Raju, Dun & Bradstreet:
Yeah. There was a LinkedIn research also. So I’m just cutting there for a minute. So it said that, if I’m happy, I may go back to, you know, two, three people, and say that, hey, this is a good platform, and I liked it. If I’m unhappy, I may go back to 10 people and say that this is one of the worst platforms I’ve seen.
You cannot make everyone happy. Let’s all understand it. But in the process, how much time the person has spent, I think you need to make sure that the person felt that this is one of the best products that I have given a test on.
Liked the resource?
This conversation is an excerpt taken from a recent episode of Hiring Diaries with Vishwanadh Raju, Head of Talent at Dun & Bradstreet India. Our entire conversation covered several topics, including:
Screening strategies for top tech talent: Understanding their importance
Decoding the process of automated technical screening.
Aligning engineering and TA functions for a successful process
Preventing funnel attrition and making the screening process more attractive to candidates.
Implementation and impact of fair technical assessments
Crafting assessments for senior engineers and data scientists
Setting the right hiring benchmarks and timelines
Things to consider when choosing an assessment platform
Evaluating and refining candidate screening processes
Remote-first hiring: creating fantastic candidate experiences
And more.
To view the entire discussion, visit here – https://skillspace.ai/hiring-diaries-203/.
More about Skillspace.ai and Hiring Diaries
The goal of Skillspace.ai is to deliver better experiences for end-to-end technical assessments with scale. In our platform, you can hire tech talent through coding assessments, AI challenges, take-home assignments, 1-on-1 interviews, and much more, all in a highly condensed and simplified manner. From early-stage startups to Fortune 500 companies such as Cisco, Alibaba, and Capgemini, we have earned the trust of companies across all industries.
We have created Hiring Diaries to support the engineering and talent acquisition communities that have trusted us so far. The goal is to create a series of live discussions with the top 1% of talent and technology leaders who share our passion for giving first. Hiring Diaries covers various topics regarding scaling technology teams and hiring the best talent. You are welcome to attend any of our upcoming events if you wish to learn more.
