We tend to look for talent in the same old places, or follow trends of the “best hire” is the “best fit”. There is no one-size-fits-all approach but these trends can undermine efforts to boost diversity and hinder creativity and innovation. This article outlines three challenges that HR teams face when it comes to talent assessment and how to keep them at bay.
Introduction
When building a business, your primary asset outside of your product is your people. But how do you decide if they are the right fit?
We’ve all hired people who didn’t work out, or encountered conflict when an employee wasn’t trained properly, or lost someone crucial to the team. While these may be singular events, however, these incidents can still cause friction in the daily operations within an organisation.
That is why talent assessment is critical to your organisation, regardless of levels, and a poor talent assessment strategy can cripple your progress forward. Some of the effects of poor talent assessment can result in:
- Fewer or lower-quality candidates
- Employees without the requisite skills
- Unchallenged, unhappy, or underestimated workforce
- Unreliable backup planning
- High turnover
Any of these obstacles can weigh an organisation down, and the demand for talent assessment is stronger than ever. However, like any assessment strategy, there will always be challenges to implementing a successful talent assessment process. This article outlines three challenges that your HR teams might face when it comes to talent assessment and how to keep them at bay.
Talent Assessments in a Nutshell
The ability to see talent, unlock human potential, and hire the right employee for the right role is crucial to running a top-notch team. Talent assessments help organisations to identify candidates with the best fit, predict a new employee’s work performance, and evaluate their retain ability in the long run.
A 2022 Talent Report by Wonderlic showed how crucial talent assessments are in a company’s talent strategy.
More than 85% of talent professionals said assessments helped them identify the potential of non-traditional candidates; 84% said assessments helped to quickly identify top candidates, while 83% said assessments can help to reduce turnover.
Now, let’s take a look at the three challenges you will need to address when implementing a talent assessment strategy.
The Challenges of Talent Assessments
The employment market on a global scale has undergone major shifts in its processes due to the pandemic. As a result, qualified talent is hard to come by. Having a streamlined process in place can help you accurately assess talent and evaluate candidates on their skills and screen them pre-interview. And you will have a better chance of attracting talents who are keepers.
Handling Manual Processes
Many organisations still have their hiring processes being documented which are all difficult to manage manually. For larger companies, these procedures can take weeks or even months for HR teams to fill the open job roles. Given the complex nature of talent assessments, we highly recommend automating these processes.
Automating your manual talent assessment processes can make your hiring process a lot smoother, and lead to far better hires than ever before. The ability to accurately assess a candidate’s skill in an automated fashion may sound too good to be true, but it can help you streamline your recruiting process.
Prominent employers in Silicon Valley such as Uber, Square, and Reddit have all seen success with incorporating automated assessment into their hiring processes. These are three reasons why automated talent assessment processes are important:
- Reduce your hiring time
- Widen your search for talent
- Reduce bias in the hiring process
Reduce your hiring time
Interview fatigue is real. The hiring process alone requires major commitment and for HR teams, moving from their daily jobs to jumping on a call with a candidate and back again can deplete mental energy and reduce overall productivity. Automating your manual processes can help to increase productivity as less time is spent on manual screening and more time can be allocated on higher-value briefs and candidates.
Widen your search for talent
Automation means scalability, and this means leveraging technology to go beyond the resume. In doing so, you can then focus on skills as well as criteria such as cultural fit, aptitude, cognitive abilities, and more to identify candidates that are most likely to succeed. Scalability also allows you to seamlessly integrate your hiring processes and build ‘ready to go’ talent capabilities.
Reduce bias in the hiring process
No matter how careful one can be during the hiring process, unconscious bias can still find a way to sneak in. For example, one interviewer may have a higher standard than others, which means that a candidate might pass the interview with one interviewer but not with another. Data-driven tools can reduce the chances of unconscious bias and eliminate inconsistency to focus on skills and fit.
It is no secret that automating your manual processes is the way forward. While it serves to reduce your hiring time, widen the search for talent with higher potential, and reduce unconscious bias, it can also improve the candidate experience. Automated talent assessments minimise inconsistencies and serve as a solid data point of reference.
Dealing with Multiple Vendors
It is worth noting that vendor management plays a significant role when dealing with multiple vendors. Selecting the right one for your business needs will set you on a path of a different kind of challenge. Effective vendor management is the key in achieving your business goal, hence, this must be done with efficiency. Dealing with multiple vendors can result in two major problem areas which are in:
- Procurement
- Financial
Procurement
Some large organisations may have their own reasons for having multiple vendors, but not everyone shares the same fate. If all these systems worked in sync to deliver accurate results, there would be no issue with going for multiple vendors. However, if the number of vendors cannot be justified, then it becomes a procurement problem.
Financial
Another factor to consider is cost. Each vendor comes with a different price point and packages, which are all managed separately. This makes proving the return on investment difficult to explain and becomes a financial problem. It is also more challenging to achieve a bulk discount when split into multiple vendors. The answer? An assessment marketplace.
An assessment marketplace enables organisations to use multiple assessment tools while only managing one vendor. This is attributable to the assessment marketplace provider being the only vendor that your organisation has to deal with and customise tool selections to any use case. All usage will be calculated as one. This means that you can now look at bulk pricings which often come with discounts, resulting in massive cost savings.
Interpreting Multiple Reports
The third prominent challenge is interpreting multiple reports, which can lead to operational problems of time wastage and a strategic problem of inaccurate decision-making.
Each onboarded tool will have its own reports with different terminologies, metrics, benchmarks, formats, and implications. It is unsurprising that some managers become resistant to assessments simply because the output is confusing, not consolidated, or that the summary provided does not help them hire better.
An assessment marketplace solves this by having an output engine built to pull data from multiple tools, understand the talent implications of that data, and churn it all out into a single consolidated report.
Since an assessment marketplace already has pre-qualified tools onboard, each tool’s data is available and is intelligently combined by algorithms to produce one report. This report serves as the single source of truth for HR and line managers. HR teams no longer need to spend time manually consolidating different reports, and the accuracy of talent decisions is now improved using multiple tools with an accurate score interpretation.
Conclusion
The benefits of talent assessments, by far, outweigh any cons they may have. From making better talent decisions to standardising practices in hiring and promotions, talent assessments are vital in HR teams.
As always, it is important to know your business goals, understand what candidates will need to perform on the job, and then deploy the right tools to test and evaluate your applicants. Talent assessment processes are as varied as they can be complex and complicated, but the payoff is a highly efficient recruitment process that can drastically improve the quality of your hires.
Related queries
Does each tool from the assessment marketplace have its own report?
All tool outputs are consolidated into a single report to avoid our clients needing to deal with multiple reports and interpretations.
How are tools in the marketplace chosen?
All tools are screened by our organisational psychologist on 3 criterion; scientific validity, cost, functional and technological advancements
What areas do the tools measure?
We are constantly adding new tools and measures into the marketplace. Currently the tools measure leadership, agility, cognitive, technical and cultural facets.
Can data from any other tools be added?
Yes, any raw data from other tools/processes can be added into the final report.
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