Talent assessments use various tools and techniques to help determine a candidate’s professional competencies, including their skills, knowledge, and overall qualifications. Many recruiters and organizations use talent assessments to help distinguish candidates who might have similar experience and education, identify strengths and weaknesses, and determine if the candidate is the right fit in a team dynamic. Hires who have the right skills and fit the company culture are less likely to quit—and, as you know, higher turnover rates can be quite costly.
Beyond helping you hire the right candidates, talent assessments can help identify areas for training and improvement for current employees. Investing in employee development can lead to benefits such as improved employee engagement, retention, and productivity.
How do you know which methods and tools are most effective for selecting the right candidates? Usually, it’s a combination of a variety of talent assessments.
Types of Talent Assessments
Talent assessments take several forms. Tests, simulations, and surveys all work to evaluate skills, competencies, and personalities to help streamline recruitment processes.
Some of the most common assessments you are likely to see are:
Cognitive Ability Tests
Cognitive ability tests measure candidates on their reasoning, perception, and problem-solving skills. Although this type of assessment doesn’t test skills specific to a job, it can reveal a lot about how someone manages tasks and social interactions, makes connections, and learns new material.
Personality Tests
Personality assessments test someone’s traits, values, and morals in the context of a work environment to find out how they interact with others. A personality test is beneficial for workplaces that want to encourage a diverse pool of talent and differing opinions.
Situational Judgment Tests
Similar to a cognitive test, a situational judgment assessment tests a candidate on how they would react to specific situations. This can reveal a candidate’s ability to effectively communicate with others and how they might react in stressful situations.
Skill Assessments
Although a resume and interview can reveal much about a candidate’s experience, they are ultimately subjective. A skills assessment provides an objective report on a candidate’s ability to perform specific skills needed for a job.
Industry-Specific Assessments
Similar to a skills assessment, an industry-specific assessment tests real-world situations based on the industry of the company. While a skills assessment hones in on the specific job, an industry-specific assessment takes a broader approach to test the candidate on their understanding of the industry.
How Talent Assessments Improve Hiring Decisions and Reduce Turnover
Talent assessments provide organizations and recruiters with a number of benefits. Data from assessments can reveal:
Fairness and Inclusivity
Rather than relying solely on interviews, resumes, and references, a skills assessment focuses strictly on the skills required for the position. This helps to reduce bias in the interviewing process.
Value Alignment
Personality tests can reveal a lot about who someone is as a person—not just an employee. This can help indicate whether they would be a good collaborator, coworker, and contributor to company culture.
Reduced Turnover
When you hire the right candidates based on their skills, values, and personality, they are more likely to stay with the company longer. And that’s good news for you too—replacing employees can cost one-half to two times the employee's annual salary.
How Assessments Identify Training Needs and Career Development Paths
A talent assessment isn’t just a useful way to hire good employees. It can also be used to develop employees, find strengths and weaknesses, and improve employee engagement and retention.
Use talent assessment tools for:
Identification of Knowledge and Skills Gaps
As a current employee makes their way through a talent assessment, the test will analyze their current skills, knowledge, and ability—as well as those that they lack. From there, data that identifies knowledge and skills gaps can be used to encourage training, attendance at conferences, and other types of employee development.
Increase in Job Satisfaction
When you identify training needs based on data from talent assessments, you can help to identify areas for career development, which can help increase job satisfaction.
Promotion of Continuous Improvement
No one wants to find themselves stagnating in their job, and your employees are no different. They want to continue to grow in their position. Identifying training opportunities based on talent assessments can help promote continuous improvement and prevent stagnation.
Improvement of Training Processes
Measuring the success of your training programs is crucial to the success of employee development. By measuring employee performance after each training, you can identify if a different type of training would be more effective.
Science-Backed Talent Assessments from Talevation
Hiring top talent shouldn’t be difficult, nor should it take a significant amount of time. At Talevation, we don’t believe in one-size-fits-all solutions. Instead, we developed a library of talent assessments that are geared toward specific business needs and industries.
Whether you need to ensure your candidates possess the required skills, eliminate bias in the hiring process, improve decision-making, or reduce turnover, we would love to talk about how our assessments can help. Book a discovery call with us today!
