Most recruiters know that feeling: you look at a candidate’s CV and it instantly grabs your attention. You meet them in person, have a great conversation, and something just clicks. Your gut says: “This is the one.”

Sometimes your instinct is right. But what about those times when a great first impression results in a not-so-great fit? One that will become clear a few weeks later? 

Hiring decisions are complex, and recruiters usually have limited time to get it right. But not if they invest in talent assessments, a valuable tool that uses data to support HR teams. 

You should know how they work, though. In this guide, we’ll analyze what a skills assessment is, plus its benefits and main types. We’ll also discuss how to leverage them to capture everything that resume screening and interviews might miss. Now let’s start with a definition.

What is a Talent Assessment?

A talent assessment is a test used by companies and recruiters to identify the most qualified candidates for an open position. It offers scientifically backed insights into an individual’s skill set, helping you evaluate their capabilities and level of expertise.

Besides that, pre-hire assessments help you review personality and behavioral traits. For instance, they could reveal if a candidate performs better independently or as a team player. Or show how someone reacts under pressure: do they stay calm or get reactive?

What’s more, hiring teams may use these tests to determine whether an individual fits their company culture. In other words, whether they share your organization’s core values and may help you reinforce your vision over time.

Why should you use Talent Assessments?

Talent assessments provide objective insights so you can find, hire, and retain top talent quickly and effectively. 78% of HR professionals have picked up on their value, saying they’ve managed to improve their hiring efforts quality using this testing method.

Here’s why they choose to invest in this helpful tool (and why you should, too):

• You save time and money: Most job listings get dozens if not hundreds of applications. With assessments, you automatically filter out unqualified candidates, ensuring that only the best candidates make it to the final selection. By focusing on them, you minimize errors, reduce time-to-hire, and save costs and team effort. 
  
  

• They verify candidate skills: Traditional recruiting is limited to reading resumes, conducting interviews, checking references. But you can’t know for sure, regardless of your experience. Assessments go beyond the standard interview, helping verify in real-time if candidates have the skillset mentioned on their CVs.
  
  

• They boost workplace diversity: These testing tools are built to ignore certain inherent characteristics (e.g., gender or ethnicity). Instead, they test acquired strengths, such as job-specific traits and overall qualities. This way, they prevent bias, ensuring an inclusive recruitment process based on the same criteria.

• You increase employee retention: When you test a candidate’s skills with assessments, you get reliable data that they’re a perfect match. On the applicant’s side, these tests verify that they can meet the role’s expectations. So, they’re far more likely to turn into engaged, confident employees. Which, in turn, leads to employee retention and loyalty in the long run.

• They contribute to talent development: Besides candidate evaluation, assessments also help companies assess existing employees’ potential. Some of them will want to enhance their abilities while others search for internal mobility opportunities. With targeted tests, you can identify them, evaluate their potential in new responsibilities, and help them tackle challenges on their way to career development. 

But talent assessments aren’t a one-size-fits all solution. So, let’s go through the most common types and how they work.

Types of Talent Assessments to use as a recruiter

There are several talent assessments to consider when hiring for a new role. What you choose depends on the industry, role, and specific abilities you need to test. But what comes before anything else are your company’s unique needs. 

So, here are the key assessment methods, along with their strengths and weaknesses:

Skills assessment

With this assessment type, businesses and HR teams evaluate a candidate’s job-related competencies. These include both soft and hard skills. 

The first help you understand how a person might communicate, collaborate, lead a team, and manage time, among others. On the other hand, hard skills determine their technical expertise in areas like programming or software application.

Skills-based hiring is probably the most objective method in the book, offering you measurable insights into the candidate’s abilities. However, you have to ensure that hard skills only test job-specific skills to ensure a bias-free and inclusive evaluation.

Cognitive test

These tests measure different aspects of the candidate’s mental capability. More specifically, you can use them to assess traits like problem-solving, reasoning, and learning speed.

In today’s world, where developments (and AI) surpass us, cognitive tests are your go-to tool to identify how a person handles these challenges. Especially if adapting to changing conditions  or learning fast is part of the job description.

This is what cognitive assessments do well. But they can be more effective when paired with other assessments. When assessing a candidate’s abilities, you’ll need the full picture, including parameters like empathy or team spirit. So, make sure to have them work together with personality and skills tests.

Personality assessment

Personality assessments allow hiring teams to dive into each candidate’s personality traits, values, and motivations (e.g., emotional intelligence, reliability, preferred working style). Also, they indicate how they might behave in various hypothetical scenarios. For instance, how they respond to stressful situations or how they work in a team.

Going beyond job-specific attributes, these tests help you evaluate whether a person is a good cultural fit, adhering to your company’s vision and work ethics.

Personality tests are  particularly helpful when used  for leadership roles or any job that requires regular personal interaction. One consideration is that they mostly focus on the candidate’s behavior, which makes them somewhat subjective. Which is why you should combine them with cognitive and skills tests to ensure someone can actually do the job.

Structured interviews

Structured interviews involve asking every candidate the same predefined questions in the same order. When the responses are in, you evaluate them based on a specific scoring system you’ve established beforehand. 

Why do structured interviews work? They’re time-saving testing methods since they enable you to conduct more interviews in less time. Plus, you access objective, easy-to-compare data across multiple candidates, leading to fair and DEI-first hiring.

If what you’re looking for is in-depth evaluation and a more candidate-friendly experience, perhaps you should combine this method with personality tests or game-based assessments. Or save them for the final stage of the hiring cycle.

Job simulations

Speaking of the final stage, this is when you need to review the candidate’s performance in real-world scenarios. Job simulations replicate these scenarios, displaying how different individuals tackle potential challenges in the corresponding roles.

Every assessment type listed here comes with its unique value. But no other method lets you see the candidate’s skills and behavior in action. This is why job simulations are widely used by companies, especially for sales, customer service, or technical roles.

However, they’re only effective after you’ve significantly narrowed down your choices. Testing several candidates with job simulations is time-consuming and could result in analysis paralysis. 

Best practices to implement Talent Assessments successfully

With the right talent assessments in place, you take the guesswork out of candidate evaluation. But to leverage their full potential, you should follow these tested strategies:

1. Define your assessment objectives

Not every organization has the same needs as others. In fact, the same company may have very different goals from time to time. So, the first step is to know what you need assessments for. 

Is it top talent acquisition or employee retention? Or perhaps you’re looking to build an internal mobility strategy. And there’s always the scenario where brands want to boost diversity in the workspace.

Of course, it’s not always an either, or case. You may have several objectives at the same time and serve them by using different tests. And it could totally bear fruit as long as you identify what you want to achieve with each assessment framework.

2. Decide on the test types

Once you define  your goals, it’s time to decide on the most suitable ways to achieve them. It’s usually the nature of each open position that will guide your decisions. 

Think carefully what “top talent” means for this specific role. What are the qualities and traits you want to evaluate? How does this role contribute to your overall strategy?

Let’s suppose your company is hiring a customer success manager. You’ll probably need a mix of job-related skills (e.g., client communication), personality traits (e.g., collaboration), and cognitive aptitudes (e.g., problem-solving) for a holistic evaluation.

It’s only natural that more than one type will align with your hiring process and goals. In these cases, always use talent assessment combinations for optimized results. Also, be ready to adapt as your needs and the recruiting landscape evolves.

3. Choose the right talent assessment tool

Knowing where you want to go is essential. But having the right equipment is what gets you from point A to point B, and, ultimately, to success. Which makes the choice of your assessment tool the most critical you’ll take.

A reliable platform is a must-have for a well-rounded evaluation. Besides reliability, here’s what to look for:

• A variety of built-in, customizable assessments that test across candidate traits and abilities, including soft and hard skills, personality and cognitive tests, and culture fit.

• Objective and science-based testing methods that bring back accurate and detailed results while ensuring an unbiased evaluation.

• AI tools that help you quickly generate assessments from job descriptions and detect any kind of candidate misconduct while complying with anti-bias laws.

• Scalability to ensure you won’t outgrow the software as your hiring needs get more demanding or pay a fortune to access advanced features.

• Monthly pricing option so you can only pay for when you need the service.

4. Use tests from the start

With talent assessments, early adoption is the way to go. After all, this is the exact reason you’re using talent assessments: saving time from screening resumes and talking to low-potential applicants.

When you use pre-hire tests from the start, you compare candidates across various skills and filter out unqualified candidates, so you can focus your time on the most promising applicants.

At the same time, these tests ensure a fair recruiting strategy for all candidates from stage one all the way to the final call. This kind of consistent hiring process improves their overall experience. The result? Talented individuals are more likely to choose your company over a competitive one that took the traditional hiring approach.

5. Make candidate experience a priority

All these steps are essential to recruit top talent. But did you know that a staggering 63% of candidates report that they would reject an effort if they had a negative application experience?

Job hunting is stressful enough as it is, which is why brands that make things easier for applicants stand out. Talent assessments should feel like a natural and smooth part of the hiring process instead of another exhausting task in the job-seeking journey.

Now let’s check how you can make talent assessments work in the candidate’s favor:

• Be upfront about what they should expect: Let applicants know the assessment format, duration, and purpose to help them prepare better.
  
  

• Invest in two-way, open communication: Every candidate should feel comfortable to ask questions regarding the assessment and the entire hiring process. You, in your turn, could request their feedback to optimize the experience.
  
  

• Provide support for certain groups: Candidate segments like people with disabilities may face difficulties during test completion, so make sure you offer assessment accommodations if needed.
  
  

• Keep applicants in the loop: Direct and clear feedback goes a long way, even for candidates that don’t make it to the next phase. Whereas sharing next steps with top performers ensures they stay informed and engaged until the next stage.
  
  

• Test the test yourself: Stepping into the job seeker’s shoes is the best way to understand their perspective. So, have hiring team members take the assessments to catch confusing instructions and technical issues before candidates do.

6. Evaluate and iterate

When looking for the right person for the job, no strategy is set in stone. Besides candidates, make sure to assess your testing methods and results, too. Ongoing monitoring and analysis is key to finding what works and turning it into standard procedure. The same goes for detecting potential shortcomings and fixing them. 

So, make a habit out of reviewing assessment data to tell where there’s room for improvement. For instance, if some high-potential candidates don’t make it to the end of the test, it could be a sign that the test is too long or complex. In which case, you should refine your approach by editing for clarity and giving them more time (or fewer questions). 

To ensure long-term success, keep these things in mind while analyzing assessment results:

• Look for patterns across segments. Check how different candidate groups perform (e.g., experienced vs entry-level). Consistent patterns across your talent pool can highlight whether your test is aligned with the role’s demands.
  
  

• Run A/B tests to create more effective assessments. Try various test versions, experimenting with different formats, question types, and time limits. Then, compare results to find the variants that better predict interview performance or job success.
  
  

• Compare test results with job performance over time. Use new hire performance data to understand if your tests have the best outcome. Assessments are meant to help you predict future success. If they’re not doing the job, you might need to make adjustments like changing what you’re measuring or how you’re scoring talent.

Start attracting talented professionals with assessments

Good hunches and vibes are a starting point. But instincts, as powerful as they are, don’t catch everything. And that’s when science-backed talent assessments enter the picture to guide hiring decisions. 

It all starts with finding the right tool for the job (pun intended). With a talent assessment platform like Bryq, you can evaluate candidates across a range of skills: soft and hard, cognitive, and personality traits. On top of that, Bryq’s tests enable you to decide if the candidate is a good fit culture-wise. 

Also, the benefits go both ways since assessments come in a candidate-friendly format, simulating real-world conversations to take some of the pressure off. Plus, you get to further optimize their experience by offering insights into their performance

What’s left on your side is following talent assessment best practices shared in our guide and building a solid recruiting strategy to attract, engage, and retain top talent.

FAQs

Below you’ll find answers to common questions on talent assessments:

1. Can hiring teams rely on just one assessment type?

The truth is a single test rarely gives you the full picture. For best results, combine several types like skills tests, cognitive tests, and personality assessments. This way, you evaluate job-specific abilities, soft skills, and cultural fit, reducing the risk of hiring poorly.

2. Do talent assessments help you minimize bias in hiring?

Yes, because they’re designed to ignore characteristics that candidates have no control over (e.g., gender, age, or ethnicity). Instead, they assess acquired strengths like job-specific skills and behavioral traits. Basically, businesses evaluate all applicants against the same criteria, which is a prerequisite for fair and inclusive recruitment.

3. What should you do to ensure a positive candidate experience during the tests?

Start by being upfront about what the test involves (like the format and duration). It’s also important to keep assessments clear and relevant to the role. Lastly, ensure you always follow up with feedback to build a memorable experience even for candidates that didn’t make it.