The analysis of HR data is crucial to improving your recruitment process. One such metric that you need to be aware of is time to hire. How long it takes for you to fill the available positions in your organization is a signal of how efficient and effective your recruitment process is. Find out how to use a cognitive skills and personality assessment to reduce your time to hire and get recruits into your business faster.

Why is Time to Hire Important?

Time to hire is defined as the length of time it takes to recruit for a role, from engaging a candidate to them accepting your job offer. The idea is to determine exactly when your ideal candidate entered the process, how long it took you to spot them, and how long it took for them to accept the offer.

Having a short time to hire has many benefits. It signals that your recruitment process is both efficient and effective. It didn’t take you long to recognize that your ideal candidate had applied, and they accepted the role soon after. This results in reduced recruitment costs for you – the less time you spend on unworthy applicants, the lower the cost of the process is.

Time to hire is also vital to candidate satisfaction and lowering turnover. The faster you get back to your ideal candidate and hire them; the easier and more straightforward they are likely to find the process. This leaves them with a positive impression of your company, ensuring that their relationship with you as their employer gets off on the right foot. This initial positive impression can last and result in someone who is more satisfied in their role and will stay in it for longer, reducing your turnover rate.

How a Cognitive Skills and Personality Assessment Can Reduce Time to Hire

If you want to reduce your time to hire, there is one critical step that you can take – adding a cognitive skills and personality assessment into your recruitment process.

What Is A Cognitive Skills Test?

Cognitive skills tests are designed to evaluate the applicant’s ability to problem solve and analyze information. Sometimes referred to as intelligence tests, these assessments measure the ability of a candidate to plan, reason, and think through solutions to problems.

The cognitive abilities of a recruit have a direct impact on their job performance. The incumbent must have the skills required to succeed in the role they are hired to do. If someone doesn’t have the cognitive abilities required, then it will be difficult for them to perform well and be productive in the position.

Types of cognitive skills tests:

• Numerical reasoning – determines how accurately the individual can work with and interpret numerical information. May be suited to a role working with budgets or data.

• Logical reasoning – this requires the comprehension of patterns and shapes to test the person’s ability to understand abstract concepts. It may be suited to a forecasting or manager role.

• Verbal reasoning – use this test if you want to know how well a candidate can read and comprehend information. This is important in a variety of roles.

• Spatial ability – tests how well the candidate visualizes and sorts objects or forms. This is useful for design or architecture roles.

• Learning agility – explore how well a respondent learns from situations and can apply these learnings to future endeavors. This is most often used for higher-level positions

What Is A Personality Assessment?

The best way to find out in-depth information about an applicant’s personal characteristics is with a personality assessment. Discover more about their demeanor and how they may act in the workplace by adding one of these tests into your hiring process.

This can help to determine the job fit of the respondent by discovering what kind of work ethic they have, their preferred ways of working, and disposition.

Personality tests may measure:

• Emotional intelligence

• Work ethic and motivation

• Degree of extroversion or introversion

• Soft skills

• Level of conscientiousness

• Ability to work within a team

• Fit for your organizational culture

• Adaptability

How a Cognitive Skills and Personality Assessment Can Reduce Time to Hire

As mentioned, including a cognitive skills and personality assessment as part of your recruitment process can cut down the time it takes to hire your new recruit. These tests are easy to implement and can save recruiters a lot of time and money spent on shortlisting candidates.

After you have screened the resumes and cover letters and taken anyone out of the process who is unsuitable, this is when you conduct a cognitive skills and personality assessment. Simply ask a list of your most viable candidates to undertake the tests you have chosen, which will assess them on the skills required of the role. It’s crucial that what you evaluate people on are the abilities that will help them to perform in the position. For example, for a sales role, you may want to use a personality assessment to see how outgoing the person is. For a managerial role, you may want to implement a cognitive skills test to find out more about their analytical ability.

These assessments can be performed online at home by the respondents, meaning that it won’t increase your workload as a recruiter. Simply ask the shortlisted applicants to complete the tests, and then it’s incredibly easy to create your interview shortlist according to the results. See which candidates performed the best on the skills they will use in the role. These are the individuals you should invite to interview.

There will be no more time spent deliberating about which candidate is more suited to the role than the others; you will have objective data to back up your decision on who to interview. This can cut days, if not weeks, off your usual recruitment process. Save yourself time and energy by making hiring decisions based on data that can help you to hire the best-suited candidate.