How can you potentially use employee assessments, particularly online tests?
Increasingly used as part of a workforce management strategy, assessments can be used across the employee life cycle.
Right from hiring to talent management, employee development and up to retirement, there can be umpteen ways to use assessments effectively.
Have you been using assessments in your organization? If yes, are you using them to full effect?
You would surely like to know how assessments can be used to make some critical business decisions that maximize productivity and profitability.
Here are some examples of online tests you can use to conduct employee assessments.
- Use Assessments for Hiring
According to a survey conducted by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), roughly about 20% companies globally use personality tests in the hiring process.
And this usage is growing at 10 – 15% annually.
You would agree that the cost of a bad hire can be humongous. It has roughly been calculated to be least one year’s salary and could even be 4 to 5 times the annual compensation.
Employment Suitability Tests can help you increase the chances of hiring new employees who are highly likely to succeed.
You can try this test here as a very effective initial filter to shortlist candidates.
- Online tests for Campus Recruitments
Many top tier companies visit and hire thousands of students from campuses every year.
While the number of students who appear may run into a few lakhs, it always helps to have an efficient filtering mechanism while conducting campus recruitments.
Assessments for Campus recruitments evaluate students on various competencies and skills.
A huge advantage here is the direct access to a large database of pre-assessed students thereby saving much time, cost and effort.
An effective campus recruitment platform can be used for advertising jobs to students, interacting and engaging with them and conducting the onboarding process.
You can then plan, schedule and manage recruitment drives and conduct the assessments online.
- Conducting Online tests for Organizational training (Pre and Post)
Assessments can be used to evaluate existing competencies of your employees.
If you would like to measure specialized knowledge or skills, custom-designed assessments can also be used here.
This can then be compared with the desired or expected competencies to identify skill gap.
Besides this, online tests can be used as an effective post training assessment to evaluate if the skill gap has been bridged effectively with the training.
- Online Assessments to evaluate employee proficiency on the job
Functional tests can also be conducted online to evaluate specific job relevant characteristics required to succeed on the job.
These tests are usually a mix of personality, aptitude and domain specific tests which are used as a combination and help you evaluate your employee’s proficiency in a specific job.
Generally, these assessments are pre-defined and you can identify your employee’s readiness ad potential to perform a particular job.
The roles tested could vary across functions such as selling skills, customer service, administrative, IT skills and various other functions.
- Online tests for Succession Planning
Are you equipped for any eventuality with your top rung of leaders?
Consider this:
Your CEO decides to quit mid-way or your other topmost executives join the competition.
Who will take their place? Are your next rung of leaders ready to fit into their shoes?
If not properly planned, it could lead to the wrong set of people taking over the leadership of your business with disastrous results.
Handling such eventualities needs a plan – Your Succession Plan.
But first you need to identify this next generation of leaders.
Thankfully, employee assessments can help you know which candidates will be best suited for your current leadership positions.
Assessments will remove the guesswork from the succession planning exercise and ensure you get the right employee the first time around.
These are some applications of online tests to conduct employee assessment for various purposes.
Let us know if there are any other online tests you have been using for your assessments.
