A company’s mission and purpose are central to its success, and the individuals who work for the company are directly responsible for maintaining its mission and purpose on a day-to-day basis. Selecting outstanding candidates to represent your company at every level is an essential component of the company’s success. It can also be more difficult than one might imagine.
Multiple studies and surveys have shown that even the most seasoned recruiters and interviewers have difficulty judging potential employees’ skills and attributes, and they often disagree on what makes a suitable candidate in the first place. Adding skills assessments such as Rate My Excel as a part of your interview process offers several advantages when evaluating potential personnel.
People are prone to unconscious biases and judgments that distort our perspective of a candidate’s skill level. The most commonly seen biases during interviews include confirmation, affinity and recency bias.
Confirmation bias, where the interviewer looks for traits or behaviors that confirm a previously held unconscious bias, may lead to exclusion of certain demographics. This type of bias is frequently rooted in stereotypes about age, appearance, or communication style.
Affinity bias, also known as “like me syndrome”, is an unconscious cognitive bias that leads people to prefer candidates that are similar to themselves in someway. This can lead to homogenized staffing, which discards a more diverse pool of quality candidates.
Recency bias, as the name implies, is the tendency for people to give more importance to events that happen the most recent. After a grueling interview schedule, it's easy to remember how qualified the last candidate was and forget about the candidates you met with the prior week.
Skills-based assessments focus on quantifiable skills and abilities, offering objective measurements that help to mitigate unconscious biases.
It can be extremely difficult to judge an individual’s ability to use the tools needed to do the job based on historical information and sample questions that are common during interviews. Resumes may be able to tell you which programs or general skills the candidate is familiar with but don’t always accurately predict the individual’s mastery of those skills. Job simulations and skills assessments help recruiters and interviewers more accurately evaluate potential employees’ ability to handle job-related scenarios in the future.
Skills related to computer programs are particularly fluid. Even skilled candidates may be used to a previous iteration of the software, or simply a different version. In the Excel world, that could mean a candidate has experience with Office 2016 and hasn't had a chance to learn XLOOKUP or dynamic arrays. Or maybe a candidate is a whiz with Google Sheets but would struggle with writing a macro in Excel.
Skills-based assessments can identify individuals who lack proficiency in relevant programs. They may also highlight highly qualified candidates who could easily be brought up to date on program differences and updates.
Higher employee retention has several positive benefits. Higher retention among employees contributes to higher engagement, a stronger company culture, and decreased costs. Employees who feel comfortable in their roles and respected for their contributions are more likely to remain with a company,especially when opportunities for advancement are attainable.
Knowing an individual candidate’s strengths and weaknesses with certain situations or core programs helps to ensure they are placed not only in the right position for right now but also provides a clearer roadmap to future advancement within the company. Including skills assessments in the interview process ensures a clearer understanding of a potential employee’s strengths and weaknesses, right from the start.
Traditional interview processes rely on information from candidates’ work history and a few brief conversations, giving interviewers a limited view of how a potential employee will fare in the future. This process is often marred by unconscious biases and may fall prey to poor predictive validity without more concrete evaluation. Including job simulations and skills assessments relevant to the job offers a more objective measurement of the skills the candidate will be using on a day-to-day basis, now and in the future.
Protect and elevate your company’s purpose, reputation, and bottom line by ensuring that the people you hire have the skills needed to confidently and competently exemplify your mission statement. Include quality skills assessments like Rate My Excel in your interview process today.