Automation is the future. But plenty of recruiters haven’t yet employed it beyond menial tasks. How can automation identify the high-quality candidates from the rest? Automation can’t actually improve the recruiting process…or can it?
Maybe you’re already using automation to optimize basic workflow tasks, like email follow-ups and scheduling (if not, here’s the lowdown on how automation can help you streamline the recruiting process).
But if you’re like many recruiters, you may not be aware of the benefits of automating your skills assessments. We understand: being able to accurately measure a candidate’s skill in an automated fashion seems too good to be true. But the future is already here. Some of the prominent employers in Silicon Valley such as Uber, Square, Nextdoor, and Reddit have already seen success with incorporating automated assessment into their hiring process, especially in technical recruiting.
Moreover, they’ll tell you that conducting assessments automatically in the early part of the hiring process has many benefits. So here are a few ways that automated skill assessments actually make your hiring process smoother — and lead to far better hires than you could’ve made on your own.
1. Save your hiring team precious time
You’re already short on people if you’re looking to hire more, which means your existing team members are already stretched. The hiring process can be a big time commitment for your hiring team members if you are assessing your candidates manually one by one. We often hear about “interview fatigue” from conducting multiple phone interviews. From the perspective of the team members conducting these interviews, days are peppered with multiple interviews that require them to switch context from their daily job like writing code to jumping on a call with a candidate and back — all of which depletes mental energy and reduces overall productivity.
Automation offers a better way. By automating the early stage phone interviews, you can save the human-driven interviews for later stages. In technical recruiting, this ensures that when a potential employee makes it further down the line, your engineers already have a general idea of the candidate’s general technical proficiency and can focus on assessing more specific skills.
2. Cast a wider net in your candidate search
Automation means scalability. When you can measure skills automatically, it frees you up from having to rely on resumes for screening candidates at the very top of the recruiting funnel. You can now go beyond resumes which merely list out information like past experience or education. This is key, since some candidates might have a lot of experience but lack the skills necessary to pass your technical bar, while others might have a lot more to bring to the table than they can convey on a CV.
With one test — and without needing to take time out of your team’s days — you can quickly scale your search efforts to find more qualified talent. By skipping manual resume evaluations, you access a much deeper and diverse pool of candidates — and the potential to discover a talented engineer who might have otherwise been excluded. Another big advantage here is that those candidates who are not chased down by your competitors tend to increase your offer acceptance and employee retention rates.
3. Reduces bias in your hiring process
You expect your hiring process to be fair, but unconscious bias has a way of sneaking in when people are at the helm. Being able to conduct a structured and objective interview every single time requires a lot of practice and consistency in place. And there is always that one interviewer whose standard is higher than others, which means that a candidate might pass the interview with one interviewer, but not with another.
This inconsistency hurts your hiring efforts and can lead to a negative candidate experience. By making an automated test the first hurdle that candidates have to jump, you’re able to minimize any bias. The skill assessment result can also serve as a solid data point to refer back to when you introduce human-driven interviews later in your interview process.
Pro Tips for Implementing Automated Assessments
Here are a few tips that can help you implement automated assessments successfully into your hiring process.
Pay attention to test accuracy and validity
The real power of a test lies in its accuracy. Imagine that someone took a COVID-19 test and it was wrong. The test didn’t provide any useful information and actually misled those who are trying to make decisions based on the test. Thus, when you try to implement a skill assessment in your hiring process, especially on a large scale, you have to ensure that it has a high degree of accuracy.
For pre-employment testing, it’s also equally important that your test does not discriminate against any particular subset of your potential candidates to give everyone a fair chance. Using a poor test can not only lead to a poor outcome, but also unintentionally put your company at risk by failing to comply with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) guidelines.
To ensure that you have a high quality test, it’s not enough to just have a tool that automates your assessment process. You should work with an assessment solution partner that can offer both an advanced tool and test design expertise. This way you don’t have to train someone on your team to create and maintain tests — and again, use up your team’s precious time. Additionally, you can trust that the tests go through a rigorous validation process to ensure they produce accurate and fair results. (Check out CodeSignal research team’s assessment frameworks.)
Bring assessments into your broader automation flow
Already using an ATS and CRM for your recruiting efforts? Your assessments don’t need to be the lone wolf — they can integrate directly with your ATS and recruiting CRM, so you can reap the benefits of a seamlessly automated hiring process. For example, CodeSignal and Lever integrate, so that you can alleviate the burden of repetitive tasks like copying and pasting assessment links and results from one place to another. This also creates consistency in the process when the same links go out at the same hiring stage for each and every candidate.
The holy grail of recruiting is to find the best candidates efficiently without putting too much of a burden on your existing team’s time and bottom line. Automated assessments can help you and your team achieve better results when less resources might be in place.
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Interested in learning more about how the CodeSignal and Lever work together? Visit http://codesignal.com/partners/lever.
Are you hoping to do more with less resources during this time? Lever just launched a Do More With Less program to help. Click here to learn more.
CodeSignal aims to make talent accessible by empowering recruiters and employers to evaluate job candidates’ programming skills effectively at scale. Its technical skills assessment solution allows companies to automate technical assessment and to conduct live interviews and is loved by customers like Uber, Brex, NextDoor, Robinhood, and Asana. Visit https://codesignal.com to learn more.