How to Create an Effective Testing and Validation Hiring Process for New Candidates

What is Candidate Assessment And Validation?

Candidate assessment can be defined as the process a company or employer undertakes to determine whether they are suitable for the role they’ve applied for. Assessments often include a candidate’s resume and cover letter, phone screening, and a formal interview. But there are also several factors to consider when deciding to hire someone, such as personality test results, behavioral assessments, and hard and soft skills tests.

Though some people may think that selecting a person based on a resume would be easy, especially when having multiple options to choose from, the truth is that hiring a new candidate can be a very long process, and sometimes it can be difficult to decide which candidates are the most qualified -and the best fit- for a specific job. This is where having a standardized assessment and validation process for potential hires can be extremely beneficial. 

Why is Candidate Assessment Important for Employers?

Candidate assessment should not be taken lightly because it’s a great way to make the hiring process more effective. By standardizing your assessment and validation process, you’ll be making sure you have an in-depth read on the individual applying for your role, which will lead to a more accurate hiring decision. Moreover, a well-crafted validation process will lead to long-lasting hires.

Also, by standardizing the hiring process, companies can improve their practices by treating and validating their applicants the same: in a non-subjective manner.

Candidate Validation Tests

Before you can consider assessment testing, you need to be aware of the requirements of the position you’re looking to fill. This information will commonly be provided by the Human Resource team or department, and it is a crucial step to both the recruitment process as well as the candidate assessment procedure. Some of these key elements are:

• Establishing clearly defined standards and expectations for the ideal profile you are looking for.
• Making sure that what you are offering for the job is attractive and competitive.
• Investigating and applying best practices in job recruiting. 

Once you have the previous information sorted out, you can now start to focus on the candidate assessment and validation process. Below you will find some of the most common candidate assessment tests. Your company may not need to perform every test, as some of these tools can vary depending on the complexity of the role they’re looking to fill.

• Personality tests: Personality tests were created to measure specific candidate personality traits, which can be tied to successful performance in the job or the position you’re looking to fill. While these types of assessments don’t provide a “right answer”, the questions are created to reveal a candidate’s personality trait, which later can be used to evaluate their fit within the organization. 

• ‍Integrity tests: Integrity tests are designed to investigate a candidate’s truthfulness and trustworthiness. These questions are designed to reveal a candidate’s past behaviors related to ethics or on interests and preferences, and the answers are used to predict future behavior and determine whether the candidate may be prone to unscrupulous actions in the workplace.
  

• Emotional intelligence tests: Emotional intelligence tests were designed to measure an individual’s ability to identify, control and assess emotions
  

• Cognitive tests: These types of tests assess abilities related to thinking, such as reasoning, memory, perception, mathematic ability, problem-solving, and reading comprehension, and they can also measure knowledge of necessary functions for a particular position.
  

• Skills tests: Skills tests determine whether a candidate has a specific set of skills required to be successful in a position, they measure ability. They also provide important insight as to how much training a candidate would need in order to perform the job. 
  

• Behavioral tests: These tests are used to predict how a candidate will react in given situations, based on responses to a series of multiple-choice, short-answer, or essay questions.
  

• Aptitude tests: Aptitude tests measures a candidate’s ability to acquire a specific skill or set of skills to perform a certain job. This is a key test to perform for positions that require a lot of training.

There are multiple factors to consider when selecting the specific test that will be used for your validation process. However, it is also equally important to have a place in which you can build and manage the process. Establishing criteria requires documenting the process, too. This said you’re going to need to structure your assessment and validation process, which will include which candidates are moving forward with the process, the timeline in which the process will take place, and how the results are reported.

Streamline Your Candidate Validation Process with Instagantt

Instagantt is a project management software that can help you standardize your candidate assessment and validation process. This tool enables you to create a list of tasks, and schedule them accordingly. This means that you will be able to have a list of possible candidates, to schedule which tests they will need to perform and to document the entire process, from beginning to end. Gantt charts can genuinely help you create efficient and standardized workflows that perfectly fit your company’s candidate validation procedures. So rather than reviewing endless applications, you can create a testing process that can significantly reduce the effort and time dedicated to it, and help you quickly identify the best applicants for you and your company. 

‍

‍

Candidate Assessment and Validation Example

‍