Increasing Use Of Scientific Assessment Tools For Remote Hiring

By: Prasoon Nigam

The Covid-19 pandemic has dramatically altered the ways organizations worldwide operate, with their recruitment strategies and processes too undergoing a radical change. Though remote hiring is certainly not a new trend, it became sort of a necessity during these unprecedented times to help organizations ensure effective hiring by avoiding or limiting physical interactions.

Now, as the waves of the pandemic gradually begin to settle down, the employment of scientific assessment tools for hiring and recruitment purposes is constantly on a rise, enabling companies to intelligently assess the candidates and their core competencies, further helping them create an efficient talent pool for their organizations. This, clearly, is a trend which is here to stay and emerge strong in times to come.

A recent Fortune survey revealed that around 47% of the Indian recruiters who never used any virtual assessment tool before the COVID-19 outbreak, have now started to use one post the pandemic. So, how do these scientific assessment tools work and aid employers in ensuring effective remote hiring? Well, it is definitely much more than just scanning or screening a resume via automation. Surely, resume screening becomes easier, faster and efficient as automation takes over to scan the pool of resumes received and finally filter the best ones for interviewing. However, it is the further stages of a candidate’s assessment – cognitive assessment, behavioral assessment and other skills evaluation, where technology champions and gives the desired results.

To start with, videos are undoubtedly a great way to interview remote candidates, as it lends a personal, one-on-one touch to the overall interview process. Of course, seeing the candidates talk and respond to questions works well for recruiters, as it helps them understand the candidate in greater depth and detail. In many cases, candidates can even record their responses to interview questions in a video format, store and share them over the cloud with the recruiter, which turns out to be fairly convenient for both parties involved.

However, if the video interviewing process is also supported with AI, it surely works as an icing on the cake. AI-powered tools greatly help in cognitive and behavioral assessment of the candidates. They allow recruiters to effectively read the facial expressions of each candidate, gauge their personality, determine and capture their ability to learn or solve problems and also delve deep into their thinking and reasoning capabilities. Also, the built-in advanced algorithms can smartly analyse the candidate’s soft skills, aptitude and other expert areas of the candidate. The shortlisted candidates can also then be assessed, scored and ranked using AI technology, which helps recruiters save a lot of their precious time, efforts and money.

Of course, organizations would always be on the look-out for candidates with certain skillsets for different positions. AI-led tools make the entire process smooth and smart for recruiters by helping them take well-informed hiring decisions, ones that are not based on gut, but those which are backed by science and technology.

So, in a nutshell, it is true that identifying and recruiting the right talent, ones that fit your organisational requirements well, is not a plain easy task. As physical recruiting takes a halt and as HR professionals learn to recruit in a remote world, it is utmost important for organizations to up their recruitment capabilities and turbo-charge their remote recruiting process. Scientific assessment tools are definitely a smart and more efficient approach to accelerate the hiring process. However, there are a plethora of these tools available now and it is important to select the right ones for your organization, ones that clearly match your business requirements.

Looks like the hiring environment in the future is certainly going to grow robust on the remote side. Interviewing and selecting candidates via technology is likely to emerge as a key trend.

(The author is CTO & Co-founder of Stratbeans and the views expressed in the article are his own)