While carrying out interviews, employers need to ascertain the inclusion of practices that will significantly help them find the perfect employee. The perfect employee is not necessarily the one with the highest qualification or the best resume, but in fact, as an employer, you should be looking for someone who is considered to be a right fit for the role and the company. When hiring IT professionals, it is essential to emulate work in the form of technical assessments or sessions that will reflect a true picture of the individual’s capability. In this article, we will explain why it is important to carry out such processes and how to incorporate them into the interview.
Importance of Technical Assessments
Even today, interviews are considered to be the standardized way of hiring. Whereas in reality, there are some job roles for which an interview session is not sufficient to test an individual’s capabilities and skills. When hiring IT professionals, it is recommended to make use of assessments that will help you emulate work within the hiring process. This is because for such a role you cannot depend on technical trivia and use the interview as the only tool to make decisions about hiring. There are a lot of skills that are needed to be measured to find the right fit.
Tips to Use when Emulating Work in an Interview
Potential candidates do not look favorably upon the inclusion of technical assessment in the interview process. However, if done the right way, technical assessments can prove to be beneficial for both, the employer as well as the potential candidate. Here are a few tips to successfully carrying out such activities:
1. Relevancy
Make sure that the kind of assessment you use is relevant to the position and requires the candidate to use the skills that will be required for that particular job role.Using assessments that are not relevant to the job role will not give you a true picture of the candidate’s capabilities.
2. Specify Goals
When designing the assessment, it is important to specify the skills that you wish to measure before the process begins. This is because keeping such skills in mind will help you determine the purpose of the whole exercise and you will only be asking questions that are relevant to the job role.
3. Prior Awareness
Letting the candidates know about the technical assessment beforehand will help them prepare themselves better for the interview. If you have an assessment that asks the right questions and measures the required skills in an efficient manner, it should not matter to you if the candidate comes in prepared. In fact, it will prevent the candidates from getting overwhelmed or anxious during the interview process.
4. Provide Feedback
At the end of the process, it is essential to give the candidates proper feedback to increase their trust in the hiring process. This is important because, without timely feedback, the candidates might feel lost. In addition to that, receiving feedback will help the candidates identify their strengths as well as weak points. This knowledge can greatly help them in the future.
Some Work Exercises
- The first method to incorporate technical assessments is by making them perform the same work that they would be doing for the job role in question.
- You can also add technical questions in your interview to determine other skills such as problem solving and self-management. For example, asking the candidate what steps they would take when starting to work on a project that uses new technology will help you determine their communication and problem-solving This can be done by observing what kind of questions the candidate asks the interviewer and how they go about the whole process.
- Using the help of a Computer Aided Design Assessment (CAD) or Coding Assessments, employers can better understand the candidate’s capabilities.
Conclusion
Interviews are not enough to assess a potential candidate’s skills since they do not give the employer enough insight into the skills and capabilities of the candidate. Hence, making technical assessments a part of the interview process is a good way of enabling the employers to make the right hiring decision.
Decide Consulting provides IT staffing services. Our conclusive hiring methodology enables us to bring the best IT problem solvers to your organization. Our entire management team comes from an IT technical background giving us a unique perspective on candidates and the industry.