How Role based Assessments can Help Hire the Right Candidates  

Introduction  

For HR personnel and L&D Managers, role-based assessments are an opportunity to underpin scientifically based data that reflects the candidate’s behaviour, personality, and cognitive ability. To add an extra dimension, role-based assessment tools not only provide insights if the candidate is the right fit for the new role but also help save on hiring costs, time, and of course, training efforts.  

83% of L&D leaders agree that reskilling an existing employee is much cheaper than hiring a new one. And why not. Let’s face it. 

Remote tech hiring is a crucial task. Because the candidates you hire can make or break the success of your company. 

In the rapidly changing tech industry, aligning skill sets to match job roles is a stressful task. As an HR or L&D leader, you need to match the candidate’s tech cognitive skills, personality traits, cultural fit, and leadership qualities with the job role – it’s way too complicated than it seems to be! How do you mitigate the risks of hiring the wrong candidates? Well, you can’t eliminate the risk, but role-based assessments can certainly pave the way to assess your employee skill sets for specific job roles.  

Let’s consider a case study: 

Sweta, the HR from the talent recruitment team needs to hire a Java Developer for a unicorn tech startup. She needs to line up at least 3 candidates and process them for the F2F round with the CMO. After skimming more than 50 CVs with relevant skillsets and experience, Sweta is now confused and ponders over all of their aptitudes that seem to be so apt.  

• Who’s the best of all? 
• Is there any red flag about their ability to perform that I am unable to spot yet? 
• Will the candidate be able to meet all the specific skills including soft skills and technical abilities that benefit the organization? 

• Will he/she be a good culture fit? 

The above questions often put the HR recruitment personnel in dilemma, and you are not an exception. That’s where role-based talent assessments would come in handy. Hiring isn’t just about finding someone with matching skill sets but adding value by building the capability to deliver a strong ROI!   

Gone are the good old days when mastering just one skill used to fetch a job role and sometimes even a good promotion! Today, you need to gauge and upgrade candidates’ skill sets to stay relevant. Unless you integrate role-based assessments into the hiring process, it will be difficult to identify skill-gaps and make competent hires for tech jobs of the future. 

What are Role-based Assessments?  

Role-based assessments are efficient talent assessment tools to identify the strengths and weaknesses of candidates in terms of their technical abilities, aptitudes, soft skills, workstyles, and knowledge. Unlike judging by scholastic scores, certifications, and experience records, role-based tech assessments let HRs and hiring managers determine the right fitment for the job by assessing the candidate’s knowledge, practical skills, work style, and aptitude for the role.  

By using pre-employment role-based assessment tools, not only can you predict a new hire’s on-the-job performance, but also ascertain how close the match is to the expectations of the role. A pre-employment role-based assessment for hiring combines tests and assignments to measure candidate expertise and skill-level, contributing to better hiring decisions for advanced tech roles.   

Such important information includes valuable snapshots that will help you test role-based skills at the individual level such as: 

• predictable behavior, 
• personality traits, 
• emotional intelligence, 
• leadership traits,  
• soft skills, 
• software proficiency, 
• capability to perform technical tasks, and more.  

 A role-based assessment report can highlight your employee accomplishments and get targeted milestones for professional development. Wondering how? Let’s delve deeper!   

Role-based tech assessments – The Bridge between role-level responsibilities and enterprise-level goals 

When it comes to hiring, there’s no ‘one-size-fits-all approach’, unless it’s an impulsive decision. In some companies, executive recruiters shortlist candidates based on their gut feeling. This is usually coupled with references, interview notes, a history of past accomplishments, and one’s educational background. While some corporates do employ DISC-based behavioral tests for aptitude testing, to their utter disappointment they often end up performing tasks with no real value added to the organization’s goals. 

So how would you bridge the gap between the employee’s current skill levels and the fulfilment of enterprise strategic objectives? The answer lies in pre-employment tests through role-based assessments for hiring.  

To turn your hiring potential into success, role-based assessments offer a spectrum of insights. Such pre-employment tests can help you assess new talents in three essential ways: 

1. Customizable and on-demand skill assessments – You can design tailor-made role-based assessments as per the industry job role, tech stacks, and sectors to mimic real-life scenarios that employees are likely to face when they’re onboarded. These customizable assessments can offer great visibility to the complete job role, and the overall proficiency of candidates.  
2. Predictable job performance – Role-based assessments are powerful predictors of on-the- job success. Such tests will help you select the best potential candidates based on work-related context and predictable future work outcomes.  
3. Culture-fit – One smart move is to assess if the employee’s personality can match the work ethic. Role-based assessments for hiring can solve this puzzle through a personality test. Remember. The right candidate might excel in technical tests, but if you find them to be a cultural fit, that’s a winning combination! 

 So now you know, choosing the right test types or role-based assessments customized as per the candidate’s proficiency, personality, and work profile can make a difference. Whether it’s hiring or pre-joining, customized skill assessments can optimize your talent transformation plans by filtering the right candidates in front of hiring managers.  

Benefits of Role-based Assessments 

Since role-based assessments are designed to accurately assess the candidate’s knowledge and ensure the right fit to match the right job, there are many benefits of using them. 

Here are 5 compelling benefits of hiring through role-based assessments as part of your pre-hiring strategy: 

1. Improved quality of hire – While it’s easy to make poor–quality hire, quite often rushing to fill a vacancy can result in a top talent being overlooked. To increase the quality of hires, role-based assessments for hiring tech professionals make your job 50% easier for conducting remote work assessments.  

Through multiple assignments, not only can you generate powerful insights on a candidate’s weaknesses and strengths but also predict on-the-job future performance. Such analytical insights produce credible and comprehensive results that can reduce the friction between hiring decisions and job requirements to a large extent.      

2. Maximized employee productivity – Unlike gut-based and subjective hiring, role-based assessment tools can render credible results on competencies based on real-time situations. This ensures employee readiness to maximize business continuity and improved productivity without compromising on the quality of work.  

3. Reduced cost to the company – Pre-employment role-based assessment tools for tech hiring can reduce the cost of talent acquisition through an effective recruitment process. For example, customized tests based on real-time scenarios can predict future job performances and ensure that candidates can excel in the role. This not only increases your staff retention rate, but also you can save on hiring costs by increasing the quality of hire for long-term employment.  

4. Reduced time to hire – Did you know that the cost of a bad hire can be costly for companies? The time lost to screen candidates until onboarding and then training employees is a struggle every HR manager or L&D pro can relate to. But, if you implement role-based assessments for tech hiring, you can do more than just find the right candidates for the right roles.  

In-depth assessment results furnished by role-based assessment tools collect the right data and can help you identify skill gaps, if any. Such a structured hiring process makes hiring faster as you can take better-informed decisions to fill roles faster for final candidates. 

5. Automated repetitive tasks – AI-driven customized assessment tests based on specific roles tailored to industry, sectors, and verticals can offer you rich data insights on automated scoring, automated feedback, and evaluation. You can send a role-based assessment test link to the candidate based on the job he/she has applied for. For example, if a person applies for a marketing manager’s role, he/she is directed to branding/marketing skill tests.  

Also, you won’t need to follow up on the test-takers for test completions and schedules for consecutive rounds. Automated emails and reminders speed up the recruitment process and reduce the overall time, thereby saving on recruitment costs.  

The bottom line is that role-based assessments are capable of solving major assessment challenges by increasing the quality of hires and the likelihood of future employment success. However, online assessment tests for tech hiring are not devoid of their limitations.  

Limitations of Role-based Assessments for Hiring 

Here are the top 3 downsides of role-based assessment tests for hiring: 

• Inaccurate results: Hiring through role-based assessments might not generate specific talent insights as per changing job roles. This is because technology is changing all the time. But simulation-based assessments for role-based scenarios can go outdated. If simulation tests play out only specific and static scenarios that don’t align with the changing nature of the job or technology, it’s a sheer waste of time, effort, money, and resources.    

• Technical issues: There can be technical issues with role-based assessments for tech hiring, such as software glitches, electrical outages, unstable network connections, or programs that are incompatible with the software being used. This can spiral costs in the long run.  

• Timed assessments might limit creativity: Time-bound role-based assessments often create anxiety and limit the candidate’s ability to demonstrate potential skills, talent, and reliability.