In our previous post “Are you killing the recruitment consultant?” we discussed the issues encountered by a recruitment consultants when putting candidates through online skills testing. In summary, as Examagram is a free product the normal issues based around cost were removed. The blog explains that due to the nature of the recruitment industry skills testing is not always preferential due to time constraints on turnaround time.

In the blog it explains how the director at the recruitment business decided to take a pro-active approach by assigning a project to the business intern who had recently joined on a 3 month placement and was looking for vital experience. Following the blog, we were e-mailed many times not just from recruitment businesses but also internal recruitment teams extending their gratitude on what they had seen as a very useful exercise.

Interns are a useful resource for any business and are regularly used in most industries. Many countries and industries expect their interns to work for free. One of the main expectations of an intern in return for ‘cheap labour’ is to gain valuable work experience. Often, it is the intern that believes they could be making a genuine difference and who wants to take on more responsibility above the manual, monotonous tasks they are often assigned during their tenure.

The task offered to the intern by the director on this day provided the intern with the responsibility in which he excelled and gained valuable project based experience and at the same time offered genuine commercial benefit to the business.

Following the interest we asked the intern to give us an understanding of how he went about it, it makes interesting reading.

“When I was asked to complete the project, I was really happy. I had been there 3 weeks and I was doing well but had perhaps felt that I could be offering more to the business. I run a search on the internal recruitment system and found that there was over 10,000 candidates on the database, which would be too many to test in the time I had. Therefore, I focused on the several hundred candidates that had recently registered with the business. I got the relevant consultants to have a look over the list of candidates just to ensure that there was no one there they did not want contacted.

Previously, I had been assigned some tasks that involved speaking to the candidates, obtaining information etc, however, this time I was nervous about contacting the candidates as I would be asking them to participate in a skills test which involved selling the concept and explaining the benefit to them. In preparation I decided to write a script to ensure I could highlight the benefits to the candidates. I explained that this could improve their chances of getting an interview as it will prove their communication skills. In honesty once I explained the nature of the test, most candidates were genuinely interested in actually taking the test to see how they compared to others in the world and in their country. The Examagram test self regulates depending on the answers given so no candidate feels it is a waste of time even if they perform to a low level. When the candidates found out that they could paste a hyperlink to the test onto their CV, they really loved this feature (although not everyone did as well as they thought they would in the test so may not use it).

The dashboard is easy to use in Examagram and all the e-mails are automated to the candidate, with reminders and notifications when candidates complete the test. This made the project easy to co-ordinate. The best feature is that Examagram allows you to send out the details to the relevant consultant and in some cases multiple consultants.

I had a number of tasks at the firm along with this project I could easily send 20 tests a day (it would be possible to do a lot more). I guess my proudest moment was when I heard one of the managing consultants  explaining to a client how we had a “specialist consultant running our English testing programme” when he was selling our recruitment services to a company.

Although, I have returned to my studies now I still get messages from some consultants saying that they actually put theskills testing service into their business pitch. I would definitely recommend anyone to do an internship, it is not all great work but this is definitely a project I enjoyed and in reality how often do you get to add genuine business value to an organization. The director even got me to write a brief trainers guide before I left which was great. It also gave me great content for my university work once I returned to studies.  ” 

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