As a recruiter, you have to take care of many things – vetting resumes, finding and calling candidates, shortlisting, negotiating and then ensuring that you get paid for your effort. All of these take time. So how would you increase productivity of your team without investing in expensive new tools and more recruiters?

More effective recruitment practices and better understanding of an employer’s requirement will obviously help, but our research suggest that you can easily increase productivity in fulfilling positions by 16% on average. All you have to do is something very simple – Conduct a screening test and attach the report with the resume before sending it to the employer.

Over the last two years, SkillSign worked with fourteen recruitment consulting firms in US, Canada, Australia and India to understand the impact of written tests conducted by recruiters in final hiring decision. SkillSign has been providing online testing platform to these firms. These firms were requested to provide hiring data based on screening done by recruiters themselves. All positions were divided in three categories.

1. No written screening done by recruiter; though candidates were screened based on resumes and brief telephone chat.
2. Written screening test conducted but report not attached with resumes submitted to employers
3. Written screening test report attached with resumes submitted to employers

It’s interesting to note that there is no real difference in second and third vacancy categories, except that written screening test report was attached in third category, but not in the second.

These positions were further categorized on average experience level needed and industry. Survey results were quite interesting, even for the recruiters who provided the data.

• Screening tests are most effective in junior positions in technology, banking and insurance sectors, and least effective in positions requiring exceptional creativity or high-touch in retail, design and advertising sectors.
• Conducting screening tests for junior positions and attaching reports with resumes, resulted in 16% more positions fulfilled during the same period. Though we expected the productivity increase; such a drastic improvement surprised even us.
• Only 22% of employers asked for screening report, though a healthy 75% of them did not mind, and in fact appreciated, the written screening report provided by the recruitment firm.
• During our discussion with recruiters, we found that that even if an employer initially did not demand a written test report, it gave significant importance to the screening report results in shortlisting candidates for next rounds of interviews. And that seems to have made most of the difference.
• Employers do not generally expect very specifics screening test from the recruiter. Only 15% of employers provided their own test content. Assessing specific skills is left for later interview rounds. Even a standard but well-crafted aptitude test increases the hiring probability for junior technology or banking positions.

Interestingly, when a recruitment consultant conducted a screening test but did not submit the written report to employer, hiring probability improved by a marginal 0-4%. Apparently, it’s not enough to just conduct a screening test but providing the written report to employers dramatically improves the chances of a candidate being shortlisted for next round and thus the final selection.

Lessons for recruitment firms

You can significantly increase your revenue by getting candidates to take a written screening test and submitting the test result along with resumes to the prospective employer. Depending on the requirement, you can conduct a test unsupervised on the phone, on web or in a controlled environment of your office. Creating tests and delivering them on paper is time consuming. Use a web-based tool to create a set of tests for assessing general aptitude and in skills relevant to your niche. Discuss the content of a screening test with employers and customize, if needed, to meet a particular job requirement.

SkillSign provides an industry leading solution to quickly create and deliver tests under your own logo, get analytical score cards and email them to employers without requiring any technical knowledge or infrastructure. You can create branded tests in minutes and use them to screen hundreds of candidates. For more details on how SkillSign can help you increase your productivity, email us at recruit@skillsign.com.

www.skillsign.com

Online Assessments made Faster,Smarter and Easier