What better way to assess an employee’s skillset than with a fun and engaging assessment? The best part about skill-assessments is that you can use them for so many different purposes. From identifying gaps in knowledge, assessing training needs or determining if someone has what it takes be ready for new roles – there really isn’t anything to beat these assessments!

Why skill assessments?

When it comes to gauging an employee’s skillset, few tools are as effective as a skill assessment. Skill assessments can help managers identify gaps in an employee’s skill set, assess their training needs, and determine their readiness for new roles or responsibilities. To ensure employee development, one of the most important things you can do is create engaging skill assessments. By making the assessment interesting and fun, you’re more likely to get employees to participate and complete the assessment. Let’s explore how to create an engaging skill assessment.

Steps to creating a skill assessment

A typical skill assessment uses different formats to probe a candidate’s performance on on-to-job tasks. How will you judge if the questions in your skill assessment are valid? You simply have to see if these questions can be answered by someone who is already working that job. A skill assessment should be able to measure key performance metrics and be tailored to evaluate if the candidate can handle the responsibilities of the job role.

A skill assessment experience will vary as per the open roles. For tech roles, they tend to be immersive with coding challenges and simulations to mimic the real-life scenarios on an ordinary workday.

Step 1: Decide what to test

Each skill assessment needs to be tailored to different job roles. Each job roles has a particular skillset, based on which the skill assessment should be designed. When it comes to tech roles, measuring technical skills becomes paramount. You can take help of the job role description to list out the skills needed to be tested. Confirm these skill requirements with the hiring manager. Also important to consider is what tools the candidate would have to use on the job.

Step 2: Build the right question bank

Now that you have the list of skills required for the open job role, it’s time to frame assessment questions. If the role is a highly technical one, it’s tough to build the right assessment questions. What can help is knowing what job functions the role requires. As a part of the assessment, you can ask the candidate to perform a task close to the real job functions. This will give you insights on the capability of the candidates based on real-life scenarios rather than hypothetical situations.

But it’s not always possible to build these assessment in-house. Here assessment platforms like Yaksha can assist. Yaksha with its bank of assessment question on 70+ technologies can help you build customised assessments for all technical job roles.

Step 3: Explore various question formats

So now you have a bank of assessment questions. Next you’ll have to present them in a manner that is engaging, prompting your candidates to go through with it until the very end. To keep it interesting, you need to mix it up a little. Include different question formats – multiple choice questions, polls, open-ended questions, audio format questions, and more.

Question formats should be decided based on which skill you need to test. Technical skills like coding can be tested via virtual tech labs. Assessments with video responses can be used to judge the body language, confidence and communication style.

Step 4: Design a smooth assessment flow

Now you’re ready with an assortment of assessment questions in various formats. It’s time to arrange it in the right sequence to have the perfect flow. It all starts with easing the candidates into the assessment.

You have to start with something easy and light like multiple choice questions. Once they have been warmed up, we can get to the meaty part of the assessment with real life scenario questions. These should be the hard-hitting questions where the candidates need to draw on their experiences and apply what they have learned so far.

Finally, round it up with questions on values and culture. This will help you check their culture fit with your organisation.

Step 5: Maintain an optimum assessment length

If there’s something worse than a PowerPoint presentation, it’s a long (and boring) assessment test. The assessment needs to be just long enough to measure skills while trying to cut down drop-offs. A good rule of thumb is to keep the assessment test under an hour. Assessments for entry-level positions need to kept even shorter. On the other hand, hiring for highly technical roles require a more in-depth assessment.

Benefits of skill assessments

Evaluating a candidate using skill assessments isn’t just beneficial to the candidate but also the recruiters themselves. Skill assessments give an objective evaluation of the candidate thereby avoiding any biases that may creep in. With these tests, you’re more likely to a better fit for your job role.

Skill assessments give a better measure of abilities when compared to resume screening or interviews. Candidates tend to inflate their experience and skills in a resume and so it may give a false idea of the candidates abilities. Skill assessments give a reliable metric to consider when hiring for technical roles.

You may want to know how to efficiently conduct skill assessment tests.