Why Traditional Interviewing Is Best Paired With Technical Skills Testing

Before COVID, person-to-person interviews remained the gold standard in effectively assessing job candidates. But in-person interviews alone don’t give hiring professionals a fully accurate idea about candidates. Why? Human nature. People are by nature subjective, even when they’re trying not to be. They can’t help but bring their own backgrounds, expectations, beliefs, and implicit biases into interview sessions.

This doesn’t mean that traditional interviews aren’t valuable as part of the hiring process. They are, without question! But they’re more valuable when they’re not used as the only criteria for hiring. Conducting interviews in conjunction with pre-employment assessments — especially skills-based tests — is far more powerful.

Skills testing for remote and hybrid teams

Knowing how to measure technical skills is more important now than ever. Post-pandemic, many workplaces have moved to remote or hybrid workflows or are planning to move in that direction.

This shift in the way we work means that companies need the right employees in place. Not being able to see workers in person on a daily basis limits the ability of supervisors to help strengthen new employees’ skill sets. Skills testing can provide more assurance that a worker will have all the technical abilities needed to perform well on the job, even in a different work environment.

If a project requires the creation of a clear narrative, statistical analysis, and data checking, and technical expertise even newly hired employees who possess the right skills can engage in work without high degrees of supervision. Even if they are in separate physical spaces, they can collaborate effectively and divvy up tasks according to their tested strengths.

Validity in skills testing

It’s clear that skills tests can be of huge benefit in the hiring process, but before using them, employers must ensure that the content of their skills tests is valid.

Content validity in testingis critical. Many companies are being asked to present documentation to prove that their recruitment protocols are unbiased and fair — and this only makes sense, considering eliminating bias is one of the chief reasons for using pre-employment assessments.

Our TestGenius software includes a validation wizard that documents the steps taken to ensuretest validity. Because these steps are especially critical to know in case of any type of personnel or recruitment audit, the benefits of working with a trusted testing partner like TestGenius are significant.

Harnessing the power of skills tests

To make skills testing part of your hiring process the right way, start with these three steps:

1. Select the right skills-based tests.

Write down all the technical abilities you want a job candidate to have. Then, create a preliminary list of tests by selecting mission-critical tasks and duties the role will require day-to-day.

2. Test the tests.

Validate your tests before deploying them to candidates by asking successful employees to evaluate them. Employees who are already in the role you’re testing for can serve as subject matter experts and let you know where to set defensible job-related cutoff scores.

3. Administer pre-assessments to applicants.

After your internal SMEs have validated your tests, you can finalize the process. Tests can confidently be administered to all job applicants, and the results can be used for selection in the next part of hiring.

Finding the right people for open positions can seem like a challenge. If you want to strengthen your ability to hire the right candidates and build on the insights you gain from person-to-person interviews, consider skills testing with TestGenius. Get in touch today to learn more about our employment testing tools.