As the Indian economy bounces back from the Covid-19 pandemic, recruitment activity has ramped up. Although recruitments are not linear across sectors, hiring activity showed robust year-on-year growth last month.
Naukri JobSpeak, a monthly survey, showed that hiring activity remained buoyant in May 2022, sustaining the monthly run rate via a vis April 2022 while growing 40% compared to the previous year. Moreover, employers’ intent to hire freshers was up 61% compared to May 2021.
If we look at IT, one of the bigger employing sectors, the top three local companies have been on a hiring spree even in the midst of the pandemic. Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys and Wipro have increased their global workforce by 50% on average over the last five years. They had over 1.1 million on their rolls as of March 31, 2022.
In the five-year period, they have increased the headcount by 3.86 lakh people. Of this, nearly 2 lakh people—or more than half—were hired in the 12-month period ended March 2022.
Given the velocity of the recruitment activity in the country, human resource departments are increasingly depending on automation and assessment tools for screening candidates. These tools straddle various aspects like psychometrics and aptitude, besides specific skills like coding, and help recruiters streamline and simplify their recruitment drive to get the best job-fit candidates on the rolls.
Here we consider a set of assessment tools to pick for recruitment needs.
Behavioural Assessment
These tests assess a candidate’s work culture and team fit, besides foreseeing performance fit via simulation. This is a critical aspect of hiring that goes beyond the skill set as a wrong hire could affect the confidence, enthusiasm and discipline of the entire team.
These could be via realistic job previews with scenario-based quizzes that give candidates a feel for what the job would be like before they commit to applying and situational judgement tests that match a candidate’s behavioural fit to the role with immersive, interactive scenarios and effective screening at scale.
One can also divide it into both an online and offline module. The online mode would straddle in-box exercises to choose the best possible responses to the issues presented in the mails; caselets to solve the problems highlighted in a business scenario; case-study-simulators to find relevant information, diagnose issues, and recommend actions. Caselets and case-study simulators could be especially useful for mid-senior role hires.
In the offline mode, these tests could be via behavioural interviews, role-plays, group discussions and case presentations.
Given the velocity of the recruitment activity in the country, human resource departments are increasingly depending on automation and assessment tools for screening candidates. These tools straddle various aspects like psychometrics and aptitude, besides specific skills like coding, and help recruiters streamline and simplify their recruitment drive to get the best job-fit candidates on the rolls.
Cognitive Assessment
These tests enable recruiters to assess a potential hire’s ability to quickly learn, solve problems and comprehend new ideas and achieve performance targets.
Cognitive assessment looks at the ability to execute complex tasks related to problem-solving and learning. In effect, it forces the candidate to use cognitive skills to think, learn, read, remember, concentrate and focus on daily tasks and process new information.
These tests often include multiple-choice questions, sentence completion, true-false or short answer formats, covering aspects like reading comprehension, quantitative aptitude, reasoning ability, problem-solving skills, attention to detail, situational judgment and emotional intelligence.
Communication Assessment
Communication skills are among the key desirables of a potential hire but there is a major gap between what a candidate comes up with and what is required for a role.
This becomes critical for job roles such as sales, marketing, customer service and business development.
These communication tests seek to gauge skills sets related to speaking (ability to speak clearly, correctly and coherently), listening (listening attentively and clear understanding of what others communicate), reading (ability to read, process, retain and synthesize vast tracts of written information), and writing (ability to write fluently and clearly, to express ideas and thoughts effectively).
Also read: Need ROI on Org’s Training Investments? Digital Assessment Tools Can Be A Game-Changer
Psychometric Assessment
These are assessment tools for bringing objective measurement of a candidate’s personality traits, aptitude, intelligence, abilities and behavioural streak. In effect, these tests intertwine aptitude and personality tests and are meant to help firms reduce employee turn-over thereby driving down overall costs that come with training and rehiring due to attrition.
These tests could be a combination of the ‘Big Five’ theory, ‘Iceberg Model’, Critical Thinking and Abstract Reasoning as Mettle offers.
These, in turn, straddle dimensions like extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and openness to experience. In addition, psychometric assessment can have an in-built model for competencies that talks about the easy, limited information of education, experience, skills, and gut feel in combination with the essence of a person, motivations, thinking and cultural fit.
They may also bring in a test designed to assess an individual’s ability to digest and understand situations and information besides measuring abstract reasoning.
For instance, Doselect’s tests could gauge language prowess with programming questions that assess conceptual understanding of individual paradigms of a programming language. For instance, a candidate is assessed on Java could be ranked on conceptual understanding and execution of Inheritance, Polymorphism and OOPS in her code.
Domain/ Coding Assessment
These are domain-specific assessments for one of the more common skills required in the technology space these days—coding. These tools seek to benchmark candidates’ coding capabilities and test their domain knowledge.
Some tools offer a performance-based online coding test platform with real-time feedback to help companies assess candidates’ coding skills for performance benchmarking and effective recruitment. It could be integrated with domain-based online programming tests to assess abilities for instance: Java, C programming, SQL, PHP, HTML etc.
For instance, one of Doselect’s tests gauges language prowess with programming questions that assess conceptual understanding of individual paradigms of a programming language. A candidate being assessed on Java could be ranked on conceptual understanding and execution of Inheritance, Polymorphism and OOPS in her code.
It could also incorporate an auto code quality analyzer that details all violations in a candidate’s code and allots a quality score saving the HR team’s manhours and serving as talking points for further rounds. It could also measure technical skills for the code, test, debug, and deploy cycle.
Hiring the right talent for a particular role is a challenge that every organisation is facing today. The assessment tools listed above can come in handy to make an informed and data-driven decision.
