DoSelect’s Rohit Agrawal on How Assessments Are Helping Organisations Make Decisions Based on Data

DoSelect is helping organisations hire the best candidates and make sound talent-related decisions using skill intelligence, explains Rohit Agrawal, Co-Founder – DoSelect & Business Head – First Naukri.

At times like the current ones when organisations are losing sleep over hiring and retaining talent, it is imperative for them to do it right. That is where an assessment platform comes in handy and helps with data on skills, behaviours/competencies, and other elements that become the crux of all the decisions to be made.

For example, a company that hires in volume needs a comprehensive recruiting system that not just helps manage the large pool of applicants but also provides insights into their skill proficiency levels to enable decision-making and eliminate biases that could creep in and result in a wrong hire.  

We founded DoSelect with that premise in mind. The challenge today for most organisations is how to make human capital management inside a company more efficient, which means getting an individual into a job that is right for her or him; keeping the employees engaged and motivated; aligning an individual’s aspiration to larger business goals.  

Also read: Fractal Sieves Through Half a Million Job Applications to be a Net Talent Creator – Here’s How

This is precisely where DoSelect comes in. Our company provides a skill assessment platform that helps companies make decisions more efficiently using skill intelligence.  These decisions could be made while:

Talking about real-life examples we have been helping organisations across industries. I remember how one of India’s top-five IT services companies benefited from DoSelect by identifying employees with certain skills within a very short period of time, leading to a decrease in deployment time, and an increase in billability and revenue. Additionally, the entire exercise also helped the company identify skill gaps and put together a learning plan for the year.

We also assisted a customer of ours by conducting assessments for over 5000 applicants against a job,  to create a high-quality pipeline of relevant applicants. Following that, the customer needed to interview only 300 people and make over 75 offers. And all this was done in less than a week’s time whereas the recruiter at this customer organisation was struggling to clear this pool for over 3 weeks. Imagine the amount of time and effort saved for everyone including the team of panels who were running the technical interviews.

The Idea Behind DoSelect

The vision behind DoSelect is to build a platform to help organisations make talent-related decisions using a comprehensive set of data. We have just started and we have a long way to go in our journey. 

All organisations make decisions on their most important assets – The Humans. While an individual’s performance and potential are critical factors in these decisions, the decision-makers conscious, unconscious, and semi-conscious biases often influence these decisions.  

Imagine the impact that data on the strengths and weaknesses of an individual, would have on the quality of an interview conversation and the candidate’s experience thereby. And this is one type of problem that we want to solve for the industry at large.   

A profile with qualitative data derived from available context coupled with skill data from assessments is what the industry needs to be able to solve most of its human capital challenges around hiring, engaging, and retaining talent. Imagine the outcomes and impact on productivity, engagement, and motivation of your human capital when you make a decision in the best interest of their long-term aspirations, and these decisions are backed by data. 

On that note, while there are several important outcomes that data can drive in the employment life cycle, there are a few tips on how to extract maximum value from assessments while recruiting. 

Also read: Assessment Tools Help When Organisations Need to Double Down During an Economic Crisis: Mayank Kumar, upGrad

Use assessments to screen and shortlist relevant applicants 

It saves almost ⅓ of your time/effort. Sourcing through multiple channels,   screening all of them for relevance and ensuring that you provide a positive experience to every candidate/applicant can be very tedious for a recruiter. Automate the whole process using an advanced skill assessment platform like ours and sit back to plan engagement with the most relevant candidates for your job while our platform works for you tirelessly.   

One of our clients was struggling with a high inflow of applicants with numbers as large as 3500 – 4000 in a day. We helped them automate the assessment workflow at the entry itself, the career site and how the process of screening all applicants was seamless – that also helped filter out the not serious ones. 

Use assessment outcomes to drive positive candidate experience

In the competitive world that we live in today, every employer wants to provide the best candidate experience. A good candidate experience is also a brand-building exercise for the company and helps improve your offer-to-joining ratios. Whether you hire or not, if you have provided a good experience, the applicant will share that with 10 people in his / her network, so it has a multiplying effect. This will help build a positive employer perception.

Automate your applicant dispositioning on the assessment outcome to effectively communicate status to your applicants thereby taking your candidate experience a notch above your competition.

Use assessment outcome data to personalise your interview conversations

Have your panels interview for selection on the basis of the strengths of the applicant  – when you do that you have an applicant that does his / her best during the interview and is a walking & talking brand ambassador for your company. 

Use assessment outcome data to find the best-fit opportunity for an applicant

The candidate may not be the best fit for the job that he/she originally applied for. But this does not mean she is not a fit for any job. Use the skill data to map her to the most relevant job and you will have an open role filled.

To know how assessment tools can help, read our special series here

I can provide several other examples of ways and means by which data can help you solve your ‘Human Capital’ woes and would love to have conversations with you on what challenges you think can be solved using data. You can reach me at ra@doselect.com if you would like to set up a time with me.

Disclaimer: DoSelect is owned by Info Edge (India) Ltd, which also owns AllThingsTalent.org