Looking to improve your talent acquisition strategy? Struggling to identify the right candidates for your business? There could be a solution - technical assessments.
Across industries ranging from engineering to marketing, the ability to evaluate a candidate's technical capabilities effectively can determine whether you secure the best and brightest talent for your talent. For talent acquisition teams, technical assessments have become a powerful tool that streamlines the hiring process and also improves the quality of recruits.
Our guide will provide you with a comprehensive approach to designing robust technical assessments tailored to specific roles, ensuring a fair, transparent, and value-driven evaluation process. So, whether you are hiring for an engineering team, a supply chain management role, or a marketing strategist, our insights are your roadmaps to building an effective hiring strategy.
Why Technical Assessments Matter in Your Hiring Strategy
Technical assessments serve as a litmus test to validate a candidate’s skills and expertise. They bridge the gap between resumes and real-world applications by enabling hiring teams to evaluate whether a candidate can handle the roles' specific tasks and challenges.
Here is what they can bring to your talent acquisition strategy:
Assesses Real-World Skills - One of the main reasons to do a technical assessment is that it tests an applicant’s real-world skills, not just their theoretical knowledge. This is particularly important for jobs that require technical proficiency, such as engineering, software development, or data analysis.
Accuracy in Hiring - Technical assessments reduce the risk of hiring based on polished CVs or interviews alone, which are limited to the insights they can give into a candidate's suitability for a role. Technical assessments, on the other hand, provide quantifiable evidence of a candidate’s ability.
Improved Candidate Experience - Providing a well-structured, transparent assessment process builds trust with candidates and sets the tone for a positive employer-brand relationship.
Efficiency in Time and Costs - Investing in evaluations can save organisations from costly recruitment mistakes and ensure the right talent joins the team. A bad hire can cost a business up to 30% of an employee's first-year salary.
Alignment with Organisational Goals - By tailoring assessments to specific roles, you can ensure alignment with team objectives, which helps boost new hires' overall effectiveness.
Predicts Future Job Performance - Technical assessments have been shown to be reliable predictors of future job performance. By evaluating how well applicants perform on tasks that are directly related to the role, you gain important insights into how they will perform once hired.
What Do Technical Assessments Look Like Across Different Industries?
Technical assessments are highly adaptable and can be invaluable tools across various disciplines. Here are some examples of how technical assessments are used across different industries.
Engineering
Whether you need them to develop groundbreaking technologies, launch new products, or improve processes, skilled engineers bring efficiency and innovation to your business, which are key ingredients for any growing business. To make sure you make the right hire, your assessments can include audit simulations, domain-specific quizzes, and problem-solving tasks.
Example of a Technical Assessment - Ask a candidate for a quality engineer role to develop a Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) based on a provided product design scenario to evaluate their process improvement capabilities and risk assessment.
Supply Chain Management and Procurement
Professionals in supply chain management and procurement are vital in overseeing and managing every stage of the production flow, from purchasing raw materials to delivering the final product. Therefore, candidates need to display skills such as strategic thinking, analytical skills, and operational efficiency. Assessments should include case studies or simulations related to inventory management or vendor negotiations.
Example of a technical assessment - A candidate for a procurement officer role might be asked to develop a vendor scorecard based on a scenario designed to evaluate strategic sourcing capabilities.
Sales and Marketing
Hiring the right sales and marketing professionals is instrumental in building your brand, entering new markets, and customer requirements and retention. They should bring high levels of skills in communication, negotiation, relationship management, and presentation. Technical assessments in the hiring process could analyse a candidate’s ability to interpret marketing metrics, test their CRM proficiency, and provide a sales presentation.
Example of a technical assessment - A candidate for a marketing strategist role could be asked to build a social media campaign strategy with a defined budget and target audience.
Technology
Due to the innovative and fast-paced nature of the technology industry, businesses demand specialists who are experts in areas such as AI, data analysis, and system architecture. To find the right candidates, technical assessments can include simulations, case studies, or technical problem-solving tasks.
Example of a technical assessment - When assessing for a software engineer position, hiring teams can test a candidate’s programming skills by setting a coding challenge that assesses proficiency in Java or Python.
Buying and Merchandising
Professionals in buying and merchandising are crucial for brand growth and expanding into new markets, whether they work in a small, ambitious startup or a large multinational firm. They directly influence product selection, making sure it aligns with brand identity, market trends, and changing customer needs, which ultimately impacts sales performance and brand perception.
Therefore, their interview assessment could include scenario-based assessments that test negotiation skills or market trend analysis.
Example of a technical assessment - A buying and merchandising candidate can be assessed on their ability to create a seasonal buying strategy for a specific budget.
Our Top Tips for Creating Effective Technical Assessments
Now that you’ve seen the advantages of technical assessments for your talent acquisition and their use across a range of industries, here are 7 top tips for creating an effective assessment:
1. Understand the Role Requirements
You should start by deeply understanding the role you’re hiring for. Create a detailed list of important skills, technical knowledge, and competencies that align with the job’s demands. Open communication with team leaders and key stakeholders to ensure you’re addressing the key aspects of the role.
2. Keep Assessments Role-Specific
Generic, cookie-cutter tests rarely provide the insights you need to identify the right candidate. Instead, design a role-specific assessment that reflects the complexities and real-world scenarios relevant to the position. Consider practical tasks that mirror the role’s day-to-day challenges.
For example, when hiring for a marketing role, include a question asking candidates to interpret campaign performance metrics and suggest actionable improvements.
These realistic and target tasks help you evaluate if a candidate can meet the unique demands of the role.
3. Focus on Fairness
Make sure all candidates have access to the same information, tools, and resources required to succeed. Remove any contextual biases by keeping assessments objective, measurable, and unbiased. By doing this, you are comparing candidates based solely on merit.
4. Automate Where Possible
Utilise technology to simplify the assessment process and reduce manual workloads for your hiring team. Automated platforms like Codility and TestGorilla make it easier to design and deliver technical assessments and provide instant feedback, ensuring more streamlined and experienced candidates and your hiring team.
These technologies are particularly useful when recruiting for technical or engineering roles that may require coding challenges or logic-based problem-solving. Automating objective scoring also provides consistency, eliminating the possibility of human error or bias.
5. Offer Feedback
The candidate's experience should be at the top of your priority list, and one way to do this is to provide constructive feedback, even if they were unsuccessful. Doing this lets you practice goodwill and portray your organisation as professional and transparent. Make sure you tailor the feedback to highlight both strengths and areas of improvement and offer actionable advice where possible.
Taking this approach means candidates are far more likely to respect your company, even if they don’t get the job. These experiences can equal positive word-of-mouth reviews, which can help position you as an employer of choice in the job market.
6. Evaluate Soft Skills Too
Technical skills are obviously highly important when assessing a candidate, but they often don’t tell the whole story. Soft skills like communication, adaptability, problem-solving, and teamwork are critical for creating a well-rounded employee. You should include behavioural assessments, situational judgement tests, and role-play exercises as part of your evaluation process to measure these abilities.
For example, a software engineering candidate might complete a task requiring them to explain a software development process in simple terms to a non-technical audience.
7. Test Multiple Levels of Expertise
Hiring for both junior and senior positions? Make sure to design assessments that address different levels of expertise. For entry-level roles, prioritise testing foundational skills and knowledge to gauge if they are ready for growth. With more senior positions, emphasise strategic thinking and advanced problem-solving abilities. Taking this tailored approach ensures that you're identifying the best candidates while avoiding assessments that are either too changing or too basic for the vacancy.
Ready to Implement Technical Assessments in Your Hiring Strategy?
Technical assessments can be a game-changer in your talent acquisition strategy, helping to evaluate a candidate’s real-world capabilities and provide valuable insights into a candidate’s skill set, helping to reduce the risk of a bad hire and improving overall recruitment efficiency.
Whatever industry you work in - from engineering to marketing to technology. By implementing fair, role-specific, and transparent evaluations, you can secure high-quality talent that aligns with your business’s values and needs and is ready to drive the growth you need in your markets.
Placing Innovative Talent to Drive Your Business Growth
Finding the right leadership talent who meets your business's unique needs, challenges, and growth ambitions can be difficult, especially in such a competitive job market. At W Talent, we offer flexible and strategic permanent and contract recruitment services that can help you find the talent that will help future-proof your organisation.
Contact us today and let us show how ‘we see talent where others don’t.’
