How to Create Successful Talent Assessment Strategy

A Talent assessment strategy is a critical part of recruitment that can ultimately determine the success of your organization. Having a robust talent assessment strategy can help identify individuals with high potential and unique talents. Once identified, these individuals can be given opportunities to further develop their skills and advance their careers, which can ultimately benefit both the individual and the organization as a whole.

Talent assessments can be used as part of the hiring process to ensure that the right candidates are being selected for open positions. Assessments can provide valuable information about a candidate's skills, knowledge, and potential, which can help ensure that they are a good fit for the role and the organization. That's where a talent assessment process comes in.

What are talent assessments and its types?

A talent assessment strategy in an organization includes identifying, selecting, and hiring employees. It is crucial to have an effective plan in place to attract, retain, and develop top talent. This enables you to make well-informed hiring decisions, and drives business success by objectively assessing candidates based on job requirements and competencies.

Assessment tools provide valuable insights into a candidate's strengths, weaknesses, and growth potential. Hence, enabling recruiters and hiring managers to understand a candidate's suitability for a role comprehensively.

Here are various talent assessment strategies to accurately understand a candidate's preparedness for a specific position.

1. Skills assessments via online tools

According to Harvard, recent research shows that about 76% of organizations with more than 100 employees rely on assessment tools.

A skills assessment tool evaluates the skills and abilities of a candidate. It helps to determine if a candidate has the potential to perform various aspects of a job. Recruiters and hiring managers can online tools such as Live interviews, async interviews, role-based assessments for all job roles/industries to assess candidates' skills and make hiring faster and more cost-effective.

2. Work Samples

Work samples are aligned to the job the candidate has applied for to understand their abilities. It is a sample work the candidate must complete in a given period.

3. Cognitive Ability test

This talent skills assessment can evaluate a candidate's general intelligence and ability to grasp different concepts and solve problems.

4. AI-Powered Video Interviews

This type of interview enables candidates to record answers to questions and allows interviewers to evaluate the responses on their own time.

8 Benefits of Talent Assessments

1. Assess a large number of applicants

Test a large number of job applicants at the same time with the help of an employee talent assessment. As such talent recruitment processes don't include in-person interviews, hiring teams can automate tedious activities and concentrate on the more crucial tasks.

2. Build a highly skilled team

A talent assessment platform makes it easier to hire job-fit candidates from inside or outside. This lets you onboard the right people that accurately match the job requirements and have all the skills and personality traits needed to be most effective in the role.

3. Enhance scalability

A talent assessment tool will help scale overall hiring processes. A well-executed talent assessment strategy ensures that hiring managers don't have to compromise to close positions quickly.

For example, it isn't easy to accommodate multiple candidates during an in-person interview. However, opting for a async video interview tool will enable you to assess numerous candidates simultaneously. Thus, recruiters can screen more candidates on the same day.

4. Remove unconscious bias in your recruitment process

Removing biases increase diversity while ensuring that you objectively choose the best candidate for the role. Using talent assessment tools will help hiring managers think more broadly and free from human biases.

5. Improve onboarding

One of the vital factors of an employee onboarding process is aligning newly joined employees with their roles and responsibilities. Talent assessments make it easier for you by providing deep insights into the new employee's skills and personality.

Besides the role alignment factor during the onboarding process, it also provides other advantages.

• Recruiters can use talent assessments to personalize the onboarding process, making it efficient and smoother.
• You can also identify training needs before putting the new employee on the job.
• Conducting talent assessments also helps predict and plan an employee's future training needs.

6. Save time and enhance transparency

Talent assessment tools automate repetitive and simple tasks of a hiring process. As a result, it helps save a lot of time and enhance transparency. For example, if a candidate applies for a position in your organization. You can quickly redirect them to the relevant test that will help assess the candidate.

7. Reduce hiring costs and increase productivity

Bad hiring decisions are insanely expensive!  According to research, a bad hire can cost an employer 50-100% of that employee's yearly salary.

Conducting talent assessments makes it easy to steer clear of these hiring pitfalls and drastically reduce turnover. You can test the skills and personality of a candidate in a fast yet effective way. This also helps quickly validate candidates' claims about their abilities, experience, and behaviors.

8. Ensure cultural fit

A talent assessment strategy that is well-designed will take into account all the necessary factors for evaluating a candidate's suitability for a position, not just their work experience and technical skills.

One example of a component of such a strategy could be a pre-employment personality test, which would assess whether a candidate possesses the behavioral traits that align with the company's work culture. It is essential to evaluate a potential employee for cultural fit, as an employee who does not fit in with the company's culture may become disengaged and, in a worst-case scenario, could potentially harm the company.

What to consider while creating a talent assessment strategy

1. Identify the purpose and objectives

The meaning of "top talent" in hiring varies significantly from one organization to another. Therefore, before creating a talent assessment strategy, it is crucial to establish your company's specific requirements.

To begin, you can identify your organizational needs and specify the qualifications for each team. You can also discuss the specific criteria a candidate must meet with the management team.

Once you have defined the ideal candidate's skill set, it is essential to determine how to measure these skills. To simplify the talent assessment process, prioritize the list of objectives for each role and assess these skills using a skills test at the start of the hiring process. Then, move on to interviewing the most qualified candidates.

In addition, when implementing a talent assessment strategy, it is critical to consider the bigger picture and align it with broader business initiatives. Anticipate any internal obstacles and proactively address them to establish a clear path to success.

2. Perform a SWOT analysis

The right talent is essential for any organization, regardless of its size, to achieve its daily operations and long-term goals. Developing an effective talent acquisition strategy that meets current and future needs can be challenging.

One way to do this is by conducting a SWOT analysis. A recruitment SWOT analysis can help identify an organization's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, which can be compared with those of competitors to attract the best talent and critical stakeholders. While in some cases, a PESR analysis or situational analysis may be sufficient, starting with a recruitment SWOT analysis that focuses on direct and indirect competitors is recommended.

To determine the talents an organization should be recruiting, four essential metrics should be considered to understand the organization thoroughly. So, let’s talk about each.

(S) Strengths

To identify your company's advantages, consider the following questions:

• What distinguishes your organization from your competitors?
• What are your company's unique selling points (USPs)?
• What opportunities for career growth can you offer to candidates who apply to your organization?
• What talent acquisition measures is your organization taking to attract top talent?

Asking these questions can help you identify your company's strengths and differentiate your organization from competitors in the talent acquisition process. Identifying your strengths can also help you identify areas for growth and improvement.

(W) Weakness

To improve your organization, you need to identify lacking areas. By doing this, HR professionals and talent acquisition leaders can determine missing skill sets required to boost the company's overall performance.

Identifying weaknesses will help alert decision-makers to which aspects of your business need more attention. If you know what's holding your company back, you can only make informed decisions about which positions to hire for.

Here are some questions to help you:

• Where does our organization need more expertise?
• What are the areas of improvement needed?
• Why are jobseekers hesitant to apply to our company?
• Why do candidates not accept job offers?
• Is our company's recruitment process time-consuming?
  

(O) Opportunities

Opportunities are the external factors that impact your organization positively. Here you can identify business changes to leverage, which will help make the organization more resilient, adaptive, and profitable.

Here are some questions that will help: 

• Is the talent pool of our industry expanding?
• Which skill sets are in demand?
• What are the new trends or growth areas in my industry?

By identifying the latest trends and technologies that align with your industry, you can recruit talents with the right skills and experience to help meet business goals.

(T) Threats

External factors that impact your organization negatively are threats. Identifying such threats will help you decide what positions to hire to minimize their impact.

Here are some questions to help you out:

• Are the company's hiring costs rising?
• Are competitors gaining better talent?
• Is the talent pool shrinking?

Threats in your organization may be short or long-term. Either way, you need to identify your recruitment strategy. If your hiring costs are rising, consider using a talent assessment platform. This will help select the right talent and reduce the chances of a bad hire.

3. Data insights for talent acquisition

Talent acquisition analytics is the process of gathering, measuring, and analyzing recruitment data to optimize the hiring process and improve overall recruitment results. It involves tracking and analyzing various recruitment metrics, such as the number of applicants, the time-to-hire, the quality of candidates, and the cost per hire. 

Talent acquisition analytics can help organizations in several ways. Here are a few examples:

• Identify recruitment trends: Analyzing recruitment metrics over time can help organizations identify recruitment trends. For instance, you can use analytics to determine which sources of candidates are most effective, the stages of the recruitment process that cause the most delays, or the types of candidates who accept job offers.
• Measure recruitment performance: Talent acquisition analytics can help organizations measure their recruitment performance. By tracking metrics such as time-to-hire, cost-per-hire, and quality of hire, organizations can evaluate the effectiveness of their recruitment process and make adjustments to improve it. 
• Optimize recruitment processes: Talent acquisition analytics can help organizations optimize their recruitment processes. By identifying bottlenecks and inefficiencies, organizations can make data-driven decisions to improve their recruitment process.
• Reduce recruitment costs: By analyzing recruitment data, organizations can identify the most effective sources of candidates, reducing the need to use more expensive recruitment methods.

Overall, talent acquisition analytics provides organizations with valuable insights into their recruitment process, allowing them to make data-driven decisions and continuously improve their recruitment efforts.

4. An effective talent assessment tool

With organizations facing increased performance pressure, it has become crucial to streamline the talent hiring process, and companies are leveraging to navigate this situation with effective talent assessment tools. Talent assessments can significantly impact key performance indicators (KPIs), such as cost and time to hire, hiring managers' satisfaction, employee engagement, retention, and performance.

We couldn't agree more!

A study reveals that organizations that leverage talent assessment tools are 36% more likely to be satisfied with their new hire.

But why use a talent assessment tool? Is it worth it?

Well, let's try to answer by looking at five ways a talent assessment tool can make a recruiter's life easier:

1. Enhance the candidate's experience

2. Assessments based on actual tasks

3. Reduce biased-recruiting decisions

4. Minimize hiring costs and improve employee retention

5. Accurate, evidence-based information

Today we have a massive pool of talent assessment tools that offer cultural fit tests (cognitive ability tests, personality tests, etc.) to more specialized tests for niche skills or knowledge such as sales, coding, etc.

One of the assessment tools is iMocha. This platform will help you evaluate the necessary skills and hire job-fit candidates by leveraging its skills library that houses 2500+ skills tests that include coding, domain, cognitive, soft skills, and more. This platform enables you to make informed hiring decisions by objectively evaluating candidates based on job requirements and competencies.

This, in turn, will help meet your organization's needs and enhance the impact of your talent assessment strategy.

If you wish to know more about pre-employment assessments and how they can help you, visit Top 12 Skills Assessment Tools to Consider in 2024.

Conclusion

Organizations need to identify effective ways to evaluate candidates' skills in today's competitive job market. By implementing a talent assessment strategy, you can streamline the hiring process.

Using talent assessment tools will allow you to understand a candidate's strengths, weaknesses, and growth potential. This information, combined with other evaluation methods such as video interviews, background checks, etc., can provide a well-rounded perspective on a candidate's eligibility for the role.

FAQ Reference

How do you define talent assessment?

A talent skills assessment can identify candidates that will perform the best and be the right fit for a company's culture. Recruiters and hiring managers can tailor these assessments based on a specific role or the company's needs. These tests provide in-depth insights into candidates' strengths and weaknesses by evaluating their skills and capabilities.

What is a talent assessment tool?

A talent assessment tool helps assess and hire top talent while streamlining recruitment processes. These tools offer companies to test candidates for employment and determine if they are a good match for the specific job.

What is the purpose of talent assessment?

A talent assessment aims to assess a candidate's personality, work style, knowledge, or skills for a particular job. These tests help predict a new hire's on-the-job performance. You can set up any test to measure a candidate based on cognitive ability, social skills, coding knowledge, or crisis management.