When your hiring assessment tools aren’t delivering the results you expected it does more than stall your recruitment process. Ineffective assessments and recruiting tools threaten your ability to stay fully staffed, grow from within, and even your culture. Whether it's low candidate engagement, or new hires falling short of intended results, underperforming tools can cost you top talent and time. In this blog, we’ll explore practical steps to diagnose the problem, optimize your current setup, and determine whether it’s time to switch your sourcing strategy or solution. So, if you start to question if your hiring assessment tools are doing the job you need them to, consider asking these questions.
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What does the beginning of your candidate experience look like?
One sure-fire way to attract candidates and nurture your hiring process is to review the first touchpoint in the process. What do your job postings, often viewed on job boards like Indeed, look like? What about your careers page? Does the messaging speak to your employee value proposition, or is it merely a refurbished long, nebulous description of the job and company? Do they deliver a compelling answer to the candidate's ultimate question, "why should I choose you?" If not, your best candidates will look elsewhere.
Steer away from boring HR speak and long lists of knowledge, skill, and ability requirements. Tell them what they will be doing, and ask yourself “if I were to apply here, what would I want to know about this job that would get me excited about this opportunity?”
How could hiring assessments transform your recruiting ROI? Take a sample assessment.
Next, what does the candidate experience and journey look and feel like? Every touchpoint influences commitment from the moment a candidate first learns about you through the application and assessment tools. When we're immersed in a process that we've built ourselves we might not see barriers to the user experience. That's why candidate experience surveys and ongoing feedback can be such a powerful tool.
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How are your culture and values communicated to candidates?
Most candidates are attracted to a clearly communicated and strong mission and vision. This makes your value proposition a key part of the candidate experience. Communicating your values, beliefs, and greater mission is required to differentiate from the competition. Our case studies page shares a few examples of how we've built a candidate experience with hiring assessment tools that communicate and select on culture.
Are candidates given a Realistic Job Preview?
Related to culture, realistic job previews inform candidates about the demanding, difficult, rewarding, and positive elements of the role simultaneously. This is an opportunity to educate on common pitfalls and rewards that go uncovered until the first day on the job. When realistic job previews are spun into an assessment experience it's easy to execute and scale across your applicant pool. This improves the candidate experience by ensuring expectations match the reality of the job.
When often support organizations in evaluating quality of hire and determining the key drivers of turnover. Increasingly, voluntary turnover because of misguided expectations comes out as the primary reason for leaving. RJPs combat this by comparing expectations to reality. We can think that a realistic job preview is a 'nice to have,' but what are we giving up by not having one?
If this type of candidate experience seems helpful we have a full video talking through how to maximize RJPs in hiring.
How effective is your recruitment and sourcing strategy?
It's easy, but not without cost, to cast a wide net hitting many sources of applicants. Job boards like Indeed and LinkedIn, social media, job fairs, and employee referrals demand time and team resources to properly execute. So, where are successful candidates coming from? We might think about success not only as those you hire, but candidates who become employees who perform, live your culture, and stay an ideal amount of time.
Consider looking at both lagging indicators like new hire performance, as well as leading indicators of success like performance on job-relevant hiring assessments. What sources of candidates have the highest completion rates on your assessments? The strongest results on the assessments? Does this match what you're seeing with on-the-job performance?
Is your hiring process mobile friendly?
Mobile accessibility broadens the talent pool by removing barriers for the majority of candidates. Across all jobs and industries, the vast majority of candidates will rely on mobile at least once. Candidates are eager to complete steps quickly and if an email or communication comes through when we're not near our computer we often don't want to wait. A mobile friendly experience is especially important for hourly workers, younger applicants, and frontline roles. A seamless mobile experience allows candidates to not only complete applications, but quickly make updates, or move forward with a step of the process. All of this increases engagement, connection with your candidates, and completion rates.
Creating a seamless hiring process through your technology builds a positive and current employment brand and shows you value the candidate experience. This builds trust that this care and intentionality will extend to the employee experience. Clunky or non-responsive platforms create uncertainty - in a process that's already uncertain.
Ultimately, hiring tech is about meeting candidates where they are—often in the palm of their hand. It’s a strategic move that accelerates your ability to educate, engage, and build trust across the candidate journey.
