The Essential Remote Recruiting Guide for Employers

The last 7 months have given us incredible stories of how workplaces have harnessed technology for redesigning their ecosystem. Take, for instance, talent acquisition — as old IT makes way for ‘new IT’ within the altered work arena, the number of technologies that support candidate assessments for remote recruiting have suddenly exploded into a whole plethora of options — from Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Internet of Things to Asynchronous Video Interviews — all can be utilized to create completely new ways of evaluating candidates.

However, determining which of these new-fangled assessment tools will be relevant for specific assessment goals has become increasingly complex.

Yes, there are many concerns and fears organizations have around remote recruiting, like How to conduct supervised sessions online? How to ensure candidates cannot cheat when taking an assessment? How credible is the candidate evaluation score? How to onboard employees while ensuring a great candidate experience?

To help you find the answers, we’d like to give you a 3-point approach for identifying the perfect assessment solution for you:

1. Features of a good Assessment Tool
2. What to assess
3. How to maximize the application of assessment data 

Features of a Good Assessment Tool

This should be your strongest area of focus and the biggest differentiator for you to choose the right solution for yourself. You should be able to leverage the following features for candidate evaluations to conduct in-video interviews. Such solutions can tremendously help organizations like yours achieve significant traction on your talent acquisition objectives:

• Intelligent Architecture: All good candidate assessment solutions support a strong Artificial Intelligence backbone that can record, analyze and produce highly distilled, quantitative data from a candidate’s video interview so that you can make better hiring decisions.
• An End-To-End Interview Management: It helps to have an intuitive interface, a large question bank, built-in evaluation forms, candidate scorecards, full interview record-and-replay in addition to just video/audio conferencing. This kind of tool can empower the interviewer to ask the right questions, assess the quality of answers simultaneously, and increase the quality and accuracy of hiring the right candidates.
• Remote Interviews: A well-defined assessment tool should have video interviewing as a standard feature. With remote Interviews, you can put the assessor and the people assessing the candidate in the same room, even if they are on opposite sides of the world.
• Talent Pool Reach: Compared to a phone-based screening, video interviewing (VI) platforms increase the reach and scale of your hiring efforts to simultaneously evaluate multiple candidates from various parts of the world.
• Multiple Interview Formats: Most candidate assessment solutions support multiple types of interviews ranging from one-to-one, many-to-one (panel) or one-to-many interviews (group discussion). Depending on your requirements, you may want to opt for a solution that can support all formats.
• Pre-defined Question Bank: A full-service candidate evaluation tool should ideally feature a vast question bank of pre-defined questions so that interviewers can impart a consistent, standardized experience to all candidates appearing for the same position. You can also add your own questions on the fly during an interview.

A full-service candidate evaluation tool should ideally feature a vast question bank of pre-defined questions so that interviewers can impart a consistent, standardized experience to all candidates appearing for the same position.

• In-Interview Assistance For Candidate: To help the candidates deliver their best, top-of-the-line online video-based assessments use contextual scripting where candidates are guided with feedback and prompts during the course of assessments (e.g. if a candidate is going too fast, the system may prompt them to slow down and take some more time in thinking out their responses). 
• AI-Powered Scientific, Objective Scoring: AI provides a mechanism by which additional info can be collected and scored, and used alongside a human scorer. The assessment solution of your choice should provide an AI-powered score of a candidates’ social, workplace skills, and functional knowledge that is accurate, reliable, and legally defensible. It should also support custom AI-models that can be built according to your specific needs.
• Immediate Feedback to Candidate: Incorporating immediate feedback to the candidates at the end of the assessment is an extremely useful feature that can positively influence candidate experience. When candidates get a proactive response from the employer even when they have not been selected, they leave with goodwill and respect and for your brand.
• Compliance to Legislation: All data and assessments should comply with all applicable legislation like GDPR (e.g. Artificial Intelligence Video Interviewing law, etc.).

What to Assess

Personality, motivation, cognitive ability are the staples in the world of assessments, but we are moving towards assessments that include a number of different components that provide input on a collective level rather than just an individual level.

Automated candidate assessment tools make it easy for you to make sense of unstructured information. If you need to know more about the candidate’s experience, you can have a look at the résumé during the interview or better still, leverage AI (Artificial Intelligence) and NLP (Natural Language Processing) to interpret and analyze the unstructured information that is flowing in from the candidate (e.g. assessing competencies that look at the propensity of a staff member to be successful as a virtual worker as well as a manager who will be leading virtual teams).

Inspired by the Big Five model of personality, which provides strong evidence of job-relatedness, comprehensive candidate assessment tools like Smart Interview uses AI algorithms to rate an individual on functional and behavioral competencies.

Using validated questions to measure these competencies, the AI rates the content of the responses provided by the candidate using Natural Language Processing (NLP) based models. The biggest advantage of employing machine learning-based interviewing solutions is that it negates interviewer bias. By pulling all the data off an interview, VI tools analyze behaviors in a deductive way rather than a numerical way in order to help you make objective decisions on selections, developments, promotions, etc.

The biggest advantage of employing machine learning-based interviewing solutions is that it negates interviewer bias.

Application of Assessment Data

We still see psychometric assessments being used for recruitment and development, but we also see a very visible shift towards assessments aligned with predictive analytics.

Organizations are beginning to combine data from a variety of sources including their HRIS, to ask questions and make calculated forecasts on critical people metrics; can I predict tenure or turnover, promotability, who has disciplinary risks, who shows high potential?

Assessments are also increasingly used to provide insights beyond the individual level:

• From the perspective of assessments, we have seen key changes in how information is created. Organizations have started leveraging data from a variety of sources: utilization of mobile assessments, on-demand assessments, new use interfaces, Internet of Things, Wearable Devices, VR, AR, and gaming all are becoming incorporated in the assessments process — making them far more tactile and accurate.

The thing to remember is these sources of data must still be grounded in business relevant skills and experience. Candidates report a more positive experience when the assessment has relevance to the role.

• One of the most efficient ways to use these streams of data is to have a Virtual Assessment and Development Center (VADC) which helps in identifying internal talent and capability gaps.

VADCs bring in an improved degree of accuracy by mapping organizational competencies across roles, they offer actionable insights for groups & individuals, they envision and execute succession planning and they put skilling and re-skilling on the fast lane without hampering scalability.

For example, SHL’s Virtual Assessment Center is a scalable, modular and robust platform that understands and nurtures the learning needs across levels to tap High Potential Individuals (HiPPo) for an organization and can be set up on the fly. 

It enables employers to build a high-quality talent pipeline to meet future business needs. Moreover, with a unique candidate centric experience, it enhances employee buy-in, motivation and reduces time to up-skill and re-skill employees with personalized development feedback.

• A fairly new arena where assessment data has been used is for analyzing digital résumé. Organizations are learning to leverage block chain technologies in order to validate a candidate’s reported experience as well as their associated experience levels to determine the accuracy and authenticity of that experience.
• Assessment data creates a sort of digital wallet of experience and employment history for every candidate. However, one must keep in mind the risks associated with security and management of this data. Periodic snapshots of candidates during assessments, geo-tracking, IP address tracking, disabling print screen or copy and paste, face detection, behavioral statistics are just some of the ways to ensure candidate engagements are above-board, realistic and legally defensible.

All said and done, virtual solutions are not necessarily a replacement for existing assessments, rather a much-deserved addition. A lot of technology we see emerging around virtual assessments have applications beyond the assessment space alone.

The challenges we are facing today and those that will arise tomorrow provide opportunities for companies to leverage virtual technology optimally. Ultimately these advances in technology allow organizations to improve their candidate experience, gain increasingly objective results in the assessment process and make sound business decisions that allow for their sustainability.

Contact us to learn more about how SHL can help you create the best solutions on one platform for all your talent acquisition and management needs.