Top 5 Competency Assessment Tools in 2024

Struggling to identify specific skill gaps in your employees?

Looking for ways to improve your hiring decisions?

Wondering how to choose who is ready to upskill and take on new responsibilities?

The common solution to all these challenges is to invest in a Competency Assessment Tool and digitize the entire process.

Manually performing competency assessment tasks is highly archaic, error-prone, and time-consuming, with countless loopholes like:

• You cannot analyze and identify the skills gap manually.
• There are chances of an unconscious bias hampering the hiring and talent development process.
• It's challenging to map the right candidate for a specific job role.
• Manually creating customized learning for employees will take ages.
• It's tough to benchmark an employee’s competency and set individual employee goals without having an in-depth understanding of their skillset.

Competency Assessment Tool is a perfect solution to this problem and can help in talent development within the organization seamlessly.

Source: SHRM

What is a competency assessment tool?

A competency-based assessment tool measures and documents a personnel’s competency and helps identify problems with their performance so that these issues can be highlighted or corrected beforehand. This universal nature of these competency measurement tools makes them a crucial part of any recruitment, performance review, or L&D teams.

Let's understand this better by enlisting the benefits of an ideal competency-based assessment tool:

• It helps you evaluate strengths and weaknesses across your workforce
• Supports employee growth and empowerment
• Eliminates unconscious bias
• Help you create a team of qualified professionals that enable growth
• Analyzes individual performance against future job prospects
• Offers the flexibility to assess employee competency against ad-hoc requirements
• Provides individual and aggregate reporting capabilities

Top 5 Competency Tools for 2024

1. iMocha

iMocha is a comprehensive skill-assessments platform that helps you identify candidate skill sets and gaps using customizable assessments and tests. It offers you the right tools to benchmark your employee’s or candidate’s competencies.

Let’s take, for example, EY, which recently hired the top 1% of students out of more than 200 high-performing graduates from a University campus using iMocha’s Business English competence assessment.  

Before collaborating with iMocha, EY used a manual campus recruitment process that was time-consuming and resource-intensive. After switching to iMocha’s competence tests, EY was able to select the top talents from across 90+ universities in a tight timeline of four to five months.

The initiatives do not stop here. To make these competency assessments more effective and accurate, iMocha launched a new product, Skill Intelligence Cloud, in 2023, which also utilizes the powers of AI. With this platform, you can assess your employees' competencies and get a detailed insight into their current skill sets to determine their knowledge and abilities regarding a particular job role with this platform.

Based on the insights gathered from this software, you can make informed decisions regarding hiring, upskilling, reskilling, or overall talent development.

Features:

• Custom skill development
• Custom analytics
• Easy integration with existing ATS
• Industry benchmarking and calibration
• Talent process optimization
• Weekly emails to showcase assessment analytics like - top performing tests, candidate feedback, candidate invites, and candidate details
• Coding assessment tools like Live Coding Interview, Coding Compilers, Code Replay, and more
• Shareable reports
• In-depth analysis of assessments
• Vast and detailed skills library
• View all reports and compare candidate and section scores

G2 Rating: 4.4/5 (239 Reviews)

Pricing: Free demo. Visit the iMocha website to get a quote.

2. TalentGuard

TalentGuard offers SaaS-based competency assessment software that allows human resources teams and recruiters to engage and retain employees.  It helps you improve business outcomes by providing an extended network of credentialed career coaches, training programs, and content.

Features:

• Automate performance management
• 360-degree feedback
• Career pathing
• Succession planning
• Individual development planning and certification

G2 Rating: 4.7/5 (3 reviews)

Pricing: Not disclosed publicly.

Pointerpro allows you to create online assessments that automatically generate personalized reports upon completion. Whether you want to scale your business, generate leads, or save time through automation, Pointerpro simplifies all these processes. It reduces barriers to completion and provides assessment templates with questionnaires that are mobile-optimized for smartphones and tablets.

Features:

• Real-time reporting
• Identifies competency gaps
• Allows you to set performance standards
• Multi-user management and collaboration
• Improves recruitment efforts

G2 Rating: 4.6 /5 (110 Reviews)

Pricing: 7-day free trial. Four pricing options, starting at $39 per month.

Cognology offers a competency management system that helps you profile your existing workforce, find the best candidates and identify skill gaps. Cognology simplifies and automates each step of the competency assessment process and eliminates the need for manual handling and spreadsheets.

Features:

• Automates assessments, tracking, and reporting
• Identifies skill-gaps
• Customizable development tools
• Easy user interface
• Automated reminders

G2 Rating: NA

Pricing: Not disclosed publicly.

The Competency group provides you with a comprehensive suite of competency-based assessment tools and services. It understands your organization’s unique requirements and offers a customizable online tool that fits like a glove.

Features:

• Offers a competency library
• Skill gap analysis
• Online assessment mechanism
• Reporting and analytics
• Group analysis and historical trends analysis

G2 Rating: NA

Pricing: Not disclosed publicly

Conclusion

A vital benefit of a comprehensive competency assessment platform, such as iMocha, is that it creates a detailed list of specific skills required to either get a job or perform at the said job. Typically, tools like iMocha focus on employee/staff competency concerning the required job skills and allow you to hire or upskill the best candidate/employee without any conscious or unconscious bias.

When choosing your ideal competency measurement tool, ask your vendor these ten questions:

• How well it engages the candidate?
• How well it analyzes a candidate’s performance?
• Does it offer a detailed report of each candidate’s performance?
• Does it help you with your DEI initiative?
• How well it identifies skill gaps?
• Can the tool be scaled as per your business?
• Can it be used for individual and group testing?
• How easily can you customize the competency tests?
• Does it help you with your existing L&D initiatives?
• Can it be integrated with your existing ATS or other legacy infrastructure?

Also read: Top 20 Online Hiring Tools

Frequently Asked Questions

Competency assessment tools evaluate a candidate’s competency level for a particular skill or job role. You can also use it for reporting capabilities and self-assessment questionnaires to identify and rectify a candidate's skill gaps.

Competency-based assessments are generally of seven types:

• Skills Checklists: Used for apprenticeship, mentorship, and on-the-job training programs
• Competency Assessment Tests: Used for certification in a job, for performance management, and validation of knowledge and skills
• Online Competency Assessments: Combines specific job skills with performance standards
• Competency-Based Interviews: Used to screen job candidates by targeting specific competencies required for a particular job role
• Skills Gap Analysis: Used to identify gaps in a training program, job candidate, and employee
• Multi-Rater or 360° Assessment: Gives an all-round perspective on a person’s competence. They are usually used when a candidate is assessed for a leadership opportunity
• Competency Assessment for Recruitment: A self-assessment test used to determine a candidate’s skills necessary to perform on the job

You can create a custom competency assessment using four simple steps:

• List down the competencies that you want to measure
• Evaluate why those competencies are necessary and the future impact that they have on the growth of the organization
• Create a benchmark to measure a candidate/employee's competencies in the said skill or topic
• While using these tests/assessments for talent development purposes, evaluate the employees’ performance, and based on the results and identified skill gaps, create a learning program or experience