Hiring new talent is challenging in the best of times. There is plenty of research that shows that the hiring process can often be biased and unfair.
Skills assessments can help identify whether you’re selecting the best candidate for the role and provide certain on-the-job success indicators.
In our latest episode of the HR Think Tank, we spoke to Omer Molad, co-founder and CEO of Vervoe – a company that focuses on skills assessment during the recruitment process to allow every candidate to showcase their talent.
Here’s what he had to say about the different types of skills assessments, where they fit into the recruitment cycle and how it can benefit your company to hire based on skills and capabilities.
Different Types of Skills Assessments
The purpose of skills assessments is to avoid hiring solely on background and the contents of a candidate’s resume. Instead, the idea is to use an on-the-job assessment to see how the candidate actually performs in the role.
For example, it’s common for hospitality employers to have candidates do a preliminary shift in the kitchen or on the restaurant floor before hiring them. Or in the movie industry, the candidate has to audition for the role.
According to Omer, “With Vervoe, we’ve essentially taken what the movie industry has been doing – this concept of auditions – and brought it online, made it asynchronous, and made it possible and available for every job.”
And so, the different types of skills assessment would be relevant to that specific industry or job spec. For example, a sales company may have the candidate sell their product to them, or a marketing company may have the candidate submit a marketing pitch.
Skills assessments essentially put the candidates in job-related scenarios to give you insight into their skills and capabilities.
Where Does Skills Assessment Fit into the Recruitment Cycle?
Where you decide to implement skills assessments is dependent on the job position, the company and the market conditions.
Omer uses a call centre as an example. “When you’re a company that can attract many candidates, then the main problem that you’re trying to solve is filtering.”
So you would use the skills assessment right at the beginning of the recruitment cycle to try and get the applications down from a thousand to ten.
But if you’re recruiting for a highly specific position with more vacancies than candidates, you may want to use the skills assessment further down the cycle. Omer suggests that, “If you’re going to hire a data scientist or an astrophysicist, you’re probably going to have to attract passive candidates. So in that scenario, you might use a skills assessment further down the funnel after you’ve courted people and convinced them that they want to work for your company.”
So, in each instance, the skills assessment is important; it just serves a different purpose.
How To Set Realistic Pressure Points in Skills Assessments
On the topic of what companies expect from skills assessments, Omer has found a tendency to put candidates under unrealistic pressure.
For example, it’s unrealistic to expect anyone to answer a series of ten questions, one after the other, within a two-minute limit.
Vervoe discourages that kind of pressure and instead, encourages employers to think about scenarios that the candidate would actually face on the job.
Benefits of Skills Assessments
VerifyNow has been using Vervoe for 18 months now and the benefits are outstanding. Khai Ngo, CEO of VerifyNow, testifies that, “Vervoe has given us a different level of confidence that we didn’t have in the past, particularly for roles that maybe myself as a hiring manager, was not as familiar with.”
And according to Omer, confidence is the key benefit of implementing skills assessments during the recruitment process.
He explains that, “At the end of the day, until you’ve worked with someone for a long period of time, you’re guessing. So, the more you give them a chance to do a slice of the job, the less you’re relying on guessing, and the more confidence you have.”
Key Takeaways
Omer Molad, co-founder and CEO of Vervoe, is on a mission to make hiring about merit, not about background.
Vervoe replaces the traditional hiring processes with skills assessment and allows every candidate to showcase their talent by doing job-related tasks.
Make sure to tune into HR Think Tank Episode 7 – with Omer, where he shares how Vervoe’s clients like Walmart and Australia Post have effectively deployed skills assessment into their organisation and where he thinks the future of skills assessments is heading.
