12 benefits of online candidate assessment tests

Online recruiting is a double-edged sword.

On the one hand, online applications make it easy to source thousands of candidates in a matter of days. On the other hand, it’s a huge undertaking for a hiring team to manually review thousands of applications — especially when half of them are irrelevant.

Online candidate assessment tests help you cut through the noise.

By using pre-employment skills testing as part of your hiring process, you can automatically screen candidates based on their skills, not their resumes.

This helps you identify better candidates, reduce your time to hire, and eliminate hiring bias.

Not convinced yet?

Here are 13 compelling reasons why you should use online candidate assessment tests as part of your recruitment strategy.

1. Save time and resources

The primary benefit of using online candidate assessment tests is getting your hiring team’s time back. 

While online applications make it really easy for people to apply for open positions at your company, the high volume of applications can put a heavy load on your hiring team.

By administering candidate assessments as soon as a job candidate applies, you can immediately screen out candidates who don’t have the basic skills, knowledge, or traits necessary to succeed in the role.

This eliminates the need to review their CV or to hold an initial screening call with them. It also saves you from interviewing candidates who lack key skills for the role.

Resume screening tools can save you some time. However, they’re prone to false positives or negatives, and they’re easily manipulable by job applicants.

Online candidate assessments more accurately assess a candidate’s fit for a given role, as they test the candidate’s knowledge, not their ability to choose the right keywords for their resume.

If you have hundreds or thousands of candidates, this can save you hours — if not days — of time every week, allowing your hiring team to focus on more attention-worthy tasks.

2. Identify qualified candidates

Even if a candidate is completely honest on their CV about their skills and experience, it’s difficult to get a complete picture of a candidate’s fit for the role by merely scanning their CV for 30 seconds and then talking to them a handful of times.

For example, they may be quite talented but have a skills mismatch with the role.

It’s especially difficult to assess a candidate’s skills from resume screening or interviewing alone for roles with requisite hard skills — such as programming.

By using online candidate assessment tests, you can identify qualified candidates as early as their initial application by having them showcase their real skills, not the experience listed on their CV. 

This can help you shortlist qualified candidates early on, allowing you to focus your time on only the best candidates.

3. Compare qualified candidates

Identifying qualified candidates is only a small part of the hiring process. Your candidate selection process will often have you selecting between several qualified candidates. 

For example, you may have two qualified candidates with similar resumes on paper but very different personalities. In that case, whom you hire may come down to your gut feeling. Sometimes our intuitions are right, but they’re oftentimes influenced by interviewer bias. 

Online candidate assessment tests give you extra variables with which to identify candidates. One candidate may stand head and shoulders above the rest once you test them on their job-relevant skills or their cognitive abilities.

4. Make unbiased hiring decisions

Online candidate assessment tests can help you reduce hiring bias. 

In a 2019 study, Agency Central found that 96% of recruiters believe that unconscious bias is a problem that impacts the hiring process.

Despite our best intentions, bias can creep into the recruitment process in many ways, such as preferring candidates based on:

• Appearance

• Name, race, or cultural background

• Educational institutions

• Other similarities or dissimilarities to the interviewer

Hiring discrimination can lead to bad hires, inequality, and even legal issues.

While it’s not possible to completely eliminate bias or human error from the hiring process, online candidate assessment tests can help you make data-driven decisions that aren’t solely rooted in personal biases.

5. Hire a more diverse team

Ultimately, reducing your hiring bias will help you hire more diverse candidates.

Workplace diversity has tons of proven benefits:

• Diverse organizations are more creative

• Diverse teams solve problems faster

• Diverse teams are more amenable to change

• Diverse teams are more productive

• Diverse companies are more attractive as employers

• And many more…

However, hiring more diverse candidates is only the first step toward true diversity. You also have to foster an inclusive, psychologically safe environment where everyone on your team feels like a true equal.

6. Hire for culture add

Part of building a diverse and psychologically safe team is placing a high priority on company culture. 

Online candidate assessment tests can help you identify candidates who would add to your company culture (not necessarily just fit into it).

TestGorilla’s Culture Add test, for example, evaluates a candidate on their:

1. Values: how their personal values and motivations align with your company’s

2. Behaviors: how their personal traits align with those needed for the role

3. Activities: how the ways they choose to spend their work time align with the role

By testing candidates for these factors — and not just making guesses about them based on their interviews — you can more accurately identify candidates who would add to your company culture and bring a unique perspective to your team.

7. Improve the candidate experience

The candidate experience — i.e., what it feels like to apply for a job at your company — is an extension of your employer brand and personality. 

By using TestGorilla’s online candidate assessment tests, you’re showing candidates how seriously you take hiring and how much care you put into selecting the right candidates. 

This is especially true if you explain to candidates why you’re testing them: to make less biased decisions, attract a more diverse and innovative team, and hire better performers.

Candidates who feel cared for are more trusting, more likely to accept a role, more likely to give positive referrals, and more likely to succeed in their roles. 

8. Improve offer acceptance rate

Offer acceptance rate is one of the most telling recruiting metrics with respect to how candidates see your organization.

By providing a top-notch candidate experience, you’ll greatly increase the number of job offers that get accepted by candidates, allowing you to attract top talent to your organization.

9. Reduce time to hire

Using online candidate assessment tests gives you a better response time for your candidates. 

Assessment tests are part of a broader category of recruiting automation tools that allow you to identify top talent quicker, respond to the best candidates faster, and thereby reduce the likelihood that they will pursue other roles elsewhere.

By helping you gain efficiency overall, online candidate assessment tests also help you reduce time to hire, meaning that you can fill roles at a faster pace.

10. Reduce the cost of hiring

Once you account for recruiting, onboarding, and productivity loss, it can cost as much as $240,000 to hire an employee. That’s why you should pursue anything that will reduce the cost of a hire.

Bad hires are especially costly. Not only do you have to rehire to replace the candidate, but you’ll also negatively impact team morale, disrupt projects, lose customers or revenue, and weaken your employer brand.

By using candidate assessment tests to reduce your time to hire, increase your acceptance rate, and hire qualified candidates, you’ll significantly reduce the overall cost of hiring too.

11. Reduce turnover

High employee turnover can be caused by a toxic company culture, unappealing incentives, uninspiring management, and a host of other factors. You can mitigate most of these factors by hiring the right people.

Online candidate assessment tools can help you identify the best possible candidate for a role. Not only will that candidate be more likely to stay in their role long term, but their team and manager will benefit from their presence too — thereby reducing overall company turnover. 

12. Improved quality of hire

All of the above leads to an overall improved quality of hire. This means you’ll get higher-performing employees, better turnover and retention, higher manager satisfaction ratings, and better results as a company.

Start testing candidates with TestGorilla

TestGorilla helps you launch a candidate assessment program quickly and affordably, thanks to its pre-existing library of hundreds of expert-created tests. 

With TestGorilla, you can create assessments made up of different skills tests for each role, allowing you to more easily compare candidates on the skills you care most about.

Ready to make online candidate assessment tests part of your hiring plan? Try TestGorilla for free today.