Recruiter's Guide to Candidate Evaluation Software

Judging the qualifications of a candidate is an essential step in the hiring process. After all, a recruiter’s job is to fill a position with the best post possible talent. However, finding this talent can prove difficult when recruiters face hundreds of applicants, if not thousands. In these circumstances, the best talent can slip through the cracks. In fact, 60% of recruiters report regularly losing candidates before even scheduling an interview.

Candidate evaluation is traditionally done through pre-employment assessment tests and screenings. Recruiters use these to quickly narrow down applicants in large candidate pools, measure applicant skills, and apply the results to the interview process. Thankfully, with the advent of candidate evaluation software, there are now tools to streamline the challenge of evaluating and screening large volumes of candidates.  

Interview Software

Interview software has opened new options for employers looking to streamline their hiring process. These software tools create a more effective and faster hiring process, cutting down on time wasted on the most consuming part of the hiring process and granting greater flexibility for recruiters and candidates alike.

What’s more, these applications such as Qualifi, will soon offer options to integrate candidate assessment into the interview process. Qualifi’s upcoming candidate assessment tool looks to combine interview and assessment into a single, easy process.

With a virtual phone interview, employers can now review assessments and interviews. Furthermore, doing both at the same time allows candidates to combine these two steps. So, recruiters can gather both responses simultaneously, reducing the clunkiness of using multiple tools by combining them on the same platform.

With virtual phone interviews, recruiters get the added benefit of removing the time and technological restrictions that come with video interviews. Whereas video interviews require candidates to possess a microphone and webcam, phone interviews are much more accessible to everyone.

Virtual Interviews

On-demand interviews offer recruiters an interview solution that is more flexible, decreases time-to-hire, and mitigates bias.

Recruiters can use Qualifi’s virtual interview platform to pre-record their questions, deliver them to a large client pool of potential candidates, and have applicants respond at a time that’s convenient for them. Contrast this with the traditional live phone interview that requires the recruiter and candidate to schedule an interview that works for both of them, a process 67% of recruiters reported taking up to 2 hours per interview.

Virtual interviews offer a better solution that allows recruiters to assess and screen a greater number of candidates at 7 times the rate of traditional methods. With Qualifi, recruiters can screen candidates in 3-5 minutes by simply listening to the interview. Consequently, integrating the on-demand interview into your hiring process reduces time-to-hire while offering candidates a better hiring experience.

Even better, the virtual interview provides your team with more flexibility in the hiring process. Rather than sinking the time that would take to schedule and conduct an interview, recruiters can simply review interviews like a playlist, allowing them to review candidates and complete separate tasks at the same time.

Candidate Assessment

Candidate assessments allow employers to screen and assess candidates for the specific qualities that the employer wishes to match with an open position. These assessments can come in many forms. However, they all serve a similar purpose: to improve and quicken the hiring process.

The types of candidate assessments can include:

• Knowledge Tests. - Sometimes known as mastery tests, employers often job-specific knowledge tests to judge if candidates are familiar with various given aspects of the job. These tests evaluate a candidate's knowledge at the time of application.
  
  
• Cognitive Tests. -  These tests refer to a candidate’s mental capacity and are used to judge how well they handle the mental demands of a given role. The most well-known of these is the General Aptitude Test which measures a candidate’s capacity for various forms of reasoning.
  
  
• Personality Tests. - Arguably a more subjective form of assessment, personality tests are often used to judge whether a candidate will mesh well within a company’s culture. Some employers also use these to evaluate potential engagement level and productivity based on personality.
  
  
• Skill Assessment Tests. - To no surprise, skill assessment tests give employers an overview of a candidate’s soft and hard skills. These tests focus on the most important skills for successful job performance.

These and more provide recruiters with powerful tools to assess candidates.

Candidate Assessment Tools

When integrating candidate assessment tests into your hiring process, you only want the best. That’s why you need to be careful when selecting your talent assessment tools. The wrong tool may add unwanted complexity to your hiring process without any of the benefits.

Thankfully, choosing the right candidate assessment tools for your recruiters is only a matter of following the right guidelines.

You can begin your search for HR assessment tools the same way you begin a new recruitment effort — define your recruiting objectives. Of course, the main objective will always be to find the best candidate for the role. You also have to consider secondary objectives such as creating a good candidate experience, mitigating bias, and making recruiting cost-effective.

Once these are clearly defined, you can then select which types of candidate assessment will best serve these objectives.

No matter your objectives or choice of assessment, Qualifi will be able to help you streamline the process by combining interview and assessment tools on the same platform with its upcoming candidate evaluation feature. Qualifi’s service builds equity into your hiring process and mitigates bias with on-demand interviews, and soon you will be able to do the same with candidate assessment.

Screening and Evaluating Candidates

When it comes to screening and evaluating candidates, recruiters are bogged down between the options for tools and methods. Worse yet, jumping between tools and emailing assessments directly to candidates can become a serious time sink in the hiring process. That’s why it’s important to use the right methods for screening candidates.

Such methods include skill assessment tools. These assess arguably the number one priority of the screening process: finding the candidate with the right skills. Many employers use these tools at the very start of the hiring process with a candidate to winnow the unqualified candidates from the applicant pool.

Other methods include asynchronous interview tools such as Qualifi. Asynchronous phone interviews make better use of recruiter and candidate time by freeing both from the burden of scheduling and meeting for an interview. What’s more, this improves the candidate experience by allowing applicants to conduct virtual interviews any time and anywhere. In fact, candidates presented with the option to respond outside of typical business hours delivered 75.5% more responses than typical phone interview hours. These interviews create a faster time-to-hire by up to 7 times by eliminating scheduling and speeding the evaluation process.

And soon, Qualifi’s new candidate evaluation will allow recruiters to combine the power of the asynchronous interview with an effective candidate assessment using the same platform.