Choosing the Right Assessment Platform for Hiring

An assessment platform acts as one of the first engagement between an organisation and its future employee. A good assessment platform , would leave a good message about the organisation to the candidate irrespective of the outcome of the test. In one of my previous articles I wrote the importance of an assessment platform in hiring the top 10% of millennial talents. In this article , I have covered some of the key attributes that CHROs should check in an assessment platform before investing.

A good assessment platform is a perfect blend of high quality content , secure platform and a vibrant candidate community that the assessment platform attracts.

Automation 2.0

The first generation of assessment platforms (2009 to 2016) had the ability to check the correctness of the answer without the involvement of the recruiter (or the evaluator of the assessment). This gave birth to a lot of online coding competitions inspired from the success of ACM , Spoj and so on.

The second generation of assessment platforms (from 2017) will leverage the advancement of AI to not just evaluate the correctness of the answer but also to measure, how close it is to the correct answer. For Example , in a coding assessment if a good candidate has just missed the correct answer by say a semicolon , the assessment platform would grade the candidate accordingly

While the first generation platforms helped explain the recruiter various proctoring parameters, such as eye movement , off tab activity etc , the second generation assessment platforms would leverage predictive analytics and would give a security score or a security badge to the candidate. This not just means that the system can automatically predict if the candidate is attempting to cheat during the test, but also would lead in cutting down huge costs in wrong hires.

Content > Technology

Usually an organisation with more than 10 years of hiring experience , create their own content as they would have a good understanding on the standard of candidates and the quality they are after. However with the birth of the second generation assessment platforms, big enterprises depend on the content of assessment platforms itself.

An assessment platform should have a good understanding about the strengths and weakness of the candidates, all successful assessment platforms(Hackerrank , Interactetc) have a strong candidate facing end, where their platform is vetted by 1000’s of candidate on a daily basis. The ability to understand the candidate community at an outset helps the platform in setting the right standard and difficulty levels for the candidates.

Irrespective of the advancement in technology an assessment platform is only as good as the quality of diverse questions it has . The content in any assessment platform should be dynamic , a healthy assessment platform would refresh 20% of its entire library every quarter. This would ensure that the platform is live and is capable of continuously assessing the top talent.