What do you need to know about skill assessment?

What is skill assessment and how can it help you?

By Sharon Vaz

26 Feb 2021

5 min read

Skill assessment tests are tests designed to help employers evaluate the skills and knowledge of their employees to know that they have the required skills for the role.  These tests can be used during an interview process or to test current employees. 

Why use a skill assessment?

Skill assessments can be used to gauge the skills & abilities of both current and future employees.  They are designed to assess if the candidate has the skills needed to perform essential job functions.  In interview situations, they can be used to exclude candidates who do not meet your requirements. Internally they can be used for assessing promotions, building teams, or working out the department's upskilling requirements.

Why do companies use skill assessments?

Skill assessments are a valuable tool for employers to use.   They can be used to eliminate candidates before the interview stage to save time or to validate the skills candidates have listed on their CVs - is the skill at the level you need?  It may sound like you have the perfect candidate, but if you don’t use a skill assessment you will have to wait until they are doing the job to find out if this is correct.

Other ways to use skill assessments:

• To understand and develop employees skills in a way that benefits their long term goals
• To compare your company with industry standards
• To identify areas where there is room for improvement

Running skill assessments means you have a standardized & scientific method for evaluating skills which will help you have the data necessary to make properly informed decisions about your teams.

Types of skill assessment

There are a number of different skill assessments you can use.

• Hard skills assessment - like the coding challenges we run at talent4gig.
• Work sample test - you can go through past examples of their work - which is done automatically when you run a skill assessment with talent4gig.
• Personality test.  This is to show soft skills - an area we are developing at talent4gig.
• Job simulation exercise - a test normally as part of the interview
• Interviews - If you don’t know what these are then I am not sure we can help ;-)
• Combination of above - at talent4gig. we can make this easier by narrowing down who you interview to candidates that have been verified to have the skills you need.

How to run a skill assessment

If you think a skill assessment would work for you then please schedule a call with one of our product specialists.

These are the steps to help you decide if a skill assessment is right for you.

What are your goals?

What do you want to do?  Are you looking to hire? Do you want to use the report for year-end reviews?  Have you paid for training and want to see if it helped?  Do you want to upskill and are not sure which area needs improvement?  These questions can help you decide which skill assessment you should do.

What skills do you want to measure?

Do you want to measure a specific skill?  Do you need a data scientist on your team but are not sure how to hire the best one?  Are you worried that your team isn’t skilled enough to face the new challenges your business might face?

What would the ideal result of your assessment be?

When you run an assessment what would you like to see? Do you want skills validated? To see where there are areas you need to improve?  We can help you determine this and run the correct challenge so you get the data you need.

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