Online Vs Manual Assessment Tools: Which One Is Better?

A Gartner research shows that only 16% of new hires have all the skills they need in order to be ready for both their current role and the future. Evolving skill needs are among the large-scale shifts currently underway in the workplace & labour market, and traditional recruiting strategies fall short of keeping up with these changes. While recruiting teams constantly lookout for talent with necessary skills, challenges such as the ever-widening talent pool, shifting strategies, and poor hiring decisions make it difficult to assess talent.

 To bridge this gap, companies adopt online tools for assessing potential candidates. 

Impact of poor hiring decisions

Poor hiring decisions, especially in small companies for critical roles, can prove to be costly on many counts—reduced efficiency, unhappy team members due to the extra workload on them, higher turnover, and a significant cost to the company. In fact, a study by Gallup states that the cost of replacing an individual employee can range between one-and-half to two times the employee’s salary.

Thus, it becomes crucial to replace poor hiring practices with good recruitment strategies. While resumes do give recruiters a candidate’s background and insights into their past experiences, recruiters should know that there is a strong possibility of exaggeration and the candidate’s strengths may not be in the fields they are looking for.

Also read: Implementing Assessment Tools? Lessons To Take From Gamification

Issues with manual assessment tools or tests

For talent acquisition teams, online hiring or assessment tools have become a game changer in the recruitment process. We remember the days, around five years back, when recruiters would walk into college campuses for placements, with cardboard boxes full of paper stacks. They would contain question papers, answer sheets, and an answer key for recruiters to use when correcting these papers. For every answer sheet we received, we had to carefully place the answer key above the candidate’s sheet in perfect alignment, correct the answers, and give a score. It was extremely time and manpower consuming.

Often companies walk in with 8-10 staff to evaluate answer sheets alone, and still, there is room for error. These errors can prove expensive for the company and the candidate. For the company, it is losing out on a good candidate, and for the candidate a good opportunity with a good firm.

Advantages of online assessment tools

An online hiring tool, like Hackerearth, Neohire, Codility, HireMee among others solves the issue of ensuring candidates meet the minimum requirements. It makes a massive difference, especially during the recruitment of freshers in colleges when hundreds of students compete for sometimes 10-15 roles. 

Some advantages of using online assessment tools are:

• Increases speed

Online assessment tools speed up the recruitment process, since there is no manual intervention, thus saving time spent on the process.

• Increases the quality of hiring

Online assessment tools also have some tests that candidates can take to measure their skills in an efficient manner. By using the means of these tests, the quality of hires shoots up drastically.

• Scalability

There is no specific limit to the volume of candidates screened while doing physical interviews. With the increase in the number of candidates screened, chances are that the quality of chosen candidates increases as well. 

Difference between using online and manual assessment tools

The user-friendly online assessment tools provide a large database of more than 10,000 questions that can be chosen from in just a few clicks. It also takes just a second to key in a candidate’s email id. It sends the test to the candidate, so they can take it anywhere in the world. In many tools, the student can even take a free practice test to get used to it before taking the real test. Also, most tools are free of errors such as pages, not opening, broken test links, reports not being generated, and wrong questions being asked, among others. 

Also read: Talent Assessment: 5 Tools Organisations Should Factor In Their Recruitment Practice

On the other hand, for companies to set an entire question paper manually is time and people-consuming. Usually, a team sets the paper, which must be approved by the technical teams and HR teams. It often takes a week to set a question paper for technical or engineering roles.

The evaluation also becomes simple, because tools generate efficient reports within minutes of test completion, detailing the students’ capabilities in skills we look for—for example, logical reasoning, programming, and analytics. This is effective for one of the first few rounds of recruitment because it helps companies shortlist candidates quickly.

Students prefer using online assessment tools

The other advantage is online assessment tools are extremely student-friendly. Most tools are marketed to colleges as a means to train students in certain skills like coding. In many colleges, students are exposed to these tools from the first year and can even constantly practice their skills on them. The minute they come for recruitment and see the test question, they are prepared to answer it to the best of their ability. 

Cost advantages of online assessment tools

As a result, companies can complete their entire hiring process in a day. Firms can walk in, conduct tests, shortlist, conduct interviews, and roll out the offer letters the very same day.

Hiring the right talent goes a long way in improving productivity, a better team, happy clients, reducing unconscious bias, building a diverse workforce, and building a cohesive team. Tools help us do the above in a cost-effective manner because they are less expensive than the travel expenses of a larger recruitment team when visiting campuses in other cities, the accommodation expenses involved if we take more than a day for the process and as mentioned above the drop in productivity, their salary till they get up to speed, and the cost of replacing them.

Conclusion

By using online assessment tools, enterprises across industries have been saving money, time, and effort; when compared to manual assessment tools. When it comes to hiring, with a multitude of factors at play, an online assessment makes the job easier, efficiently done, and also removes any unnecessary bias/other factors that are at play during a manual assessment.