Recruiting the right talent is crucial for any organisation’s success. While CVs and interviews provide useful information, bespoke assessment exercises and tools allow those involved in recruitment to evaluate candidates’ skills and potential fit more accurately.
In addition, the findings from Sackett et al.’s (2022; 2023) recent research underscore the value of using selection systems tailored to the specific requirements of each role, rather than relying on generic, off-the-shelf solutions. Our expert Omni Assessment team explored the key findings from this research which delves into the validity of various predictors used in candidate selection. You can find out more about this research in our recent article, Shifting Landscapes in Talent Prediction: Are Cognitive Tests Still the Best Tool for Selection?
Here are the main benefits of developing your own customised assessment process, uniquely suited to your organisation, and aimed at enhancing your recruitment and selection procedures:
- Tailored Exercises Aligned to Your Specific Roles
Generic assessment tools don’t often relate directly to a given role. In contrast, bespoke exercises can be designed to replicate the specific skills, knowledge, and attributes needed for someone to perform effectively in a position. For example, for an accountant role, the process could include exercises involving the analysis of financial data and preparation of reports. These tailored exercises are intended to simulate the day-to-day tasks of an accountant, which not only provides a realistic job preview for the candidates, but it has also been found that assessment methods that use job specific predictors, such as structured interviews, job knowledge tests and work sample tests appear to be more effective in predicting work performance than assessments that evaluate more generalised psychological constructs like abilities and personality traits, as they take into account the unique demands of the position (Sackett et al.,2022).
- Assessments Designed for Your Organisation
Your organisation’s employee value proposition (EVP) is unique. Bespoke assessment tools allow you to evaluate how candidates align against the distinctive elements of your EVP. Exercises can reflect your organisation’s brand, tone of voice, and other cultural elements. This helps to provide candidates with an insight to your organisation and differentiate you from others, helping to attract and retain quality candidates. Tailored exercises provide insights impossible to glean from generic tests.
- Reflect Current Industry Standards and Best Practices
Regular off-the-shelf assessment tools often don’t keep pace with changes in industry standards, technologies, and best practices. In contrast, bespoke exercises can be continually updated to incorporate the latest developments, ensuring that your assessment tools evaluate skills and knowledge that are current and valued for any given field.
- Cost-Effectiveness
While developing customised assessment tools requires upfront investment, it pays off through long-term savings in reduced turnover. Given the high costs of staff replacement (Hiring Mistakes Are Costing UK Businesses Billions Each Year – REC) avoiding mis-hires from poor selection pays dividends. As such, when using tailored assessment tools with higher predictive validity, the chances of poor hiring are likely be significantly lower, which can lead to the development a high-performing team.
- Objective & Fair Assessments
If you want to ensure you’re following a fair hiring practice, assess all candidates for relevant job-related skills and competencies as part of your tailored process, rather than simply relying on CVs and interviews. Bespoke assessment exercises should always measure the skills, behaviours and competencies that match your actual selection criteria. If these are directly tied to your specific industry and role it can provide you with a fair and credible selection process. This provides you with greater confidence in hiring decisions.
- Managing High Volume of Candidates
Customised assessments can be particularly valuable in high volume campaigns as organisations can develop assessment processes that are specifically relevant in terms of what is being assessed; providing an excellent experience and role insight to the candidates. Once developed, these materials are ready to be deployed on campaigns, providing ease of use and consistency over time. For example, Omni worked with an organisation that wanted a more robust and consistent approach to call centre recruitment by supporting the development of exercises that simulated the specific demands of the role and supplied a direct measure of behavioural attributes that were known to be predictive of success. This standardised process is easy for the teams to deploy when recruiting and provides a clear benchmark to the hiring managers. It also helps candidates to understand the role and gets them excited about the opportunity, leading to higher acceptance rates, lower early-stage attrition and improved performance ratings.
If you’re looking to optimise your recruitment process, then bespoke assessments can have a massive impact and can be implemented quickly and at low cost. Our expert assessment consultants would be happy to talk you through the different options you need to consider when developing your own processes.
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E: insights@omnirms.com
