Otto Verhage, Co-Founder & COO and Wouter Durville, Co-Founder & CEOHowever, with the changing tides of the recruitment market, degree inflation is subsiding, and ongoing trends like the Great Resignation and the war for talent are making way for another massive reset in recruitment criteria. Many companies are starting to de-emphasise degree requirements in favour of employee skills. Helping them facilitate this change with intuitive pre-employment screening tests is TestGorilla.
In an exclusive interview with Manage HR Europe, Wouter Durville, Co-Founder and CEO of TestGorilla, talks about how they are helping companies replace present-day CV-based hiring with a more skills-based hiring technique, with a platform that assesses factors including candidates’ interpersonal skills, learning aptitude, adaptability, and technical mastery.
Revitalising the Contemporary Hiring Space
The recruitment space is witnessing a massive shift with its new focus on skills tests, accelerated by various factors. The foremost reason is the growing global talent pool. The rise in education has contributed to an increasing number of academically qualified candidates, leading recruiters to implement more astute talent hiring and management strategies. Our skills tests help companies as they don’t have to limit talent acquisition for educational and technical qualifications. We tailor questions based on clients’ requirements by means of video interviews, multiple-choice questions, and work samples to assess candidates’ personalities and demonstrated competencies.
We equally emphasise a candidate’s soft skills in our assessments. We believe the relevance of soft skills in contemporary workplaces has increased due to the shift to a remote working model, which necessitates better adaptability, resilience, and time-management skills. We test candidates’ vital collaborative skills to match the present-day remote-work requirements.
As a leading solution provider for skills-based hiring, we are champions of unbiased hiring. Movements like Black Lives Matter and the battle against anti-Asian racism and xenophobic violence in the U.S. have shed light on the discrimination in every sector. Our platform is built on the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission standards to mitigate workplace biases. We rank candidates regardless of gender, age, race, or ethnicity. We also conduct periodic differential item functioning studies to monitor adverse hiring impacts.
An Unparalleled Crystal Ball for Job Success
Much like a crystal ball that symbolises predicting the future, our crystal-ball strategy predicts a candidate’s real-time job performance. The process is not magic but a series of analyses and validations. Our psychometrics team designs a test framework using the principles of test theory, which is further developed into questions by subject-matter experts. We use the Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures (UGESP) framework and the U.S. Department of Labor’s skills analysis to verify our tests through peer review. The tests are frequently updated based on our statistical algorithms and tracked for internal consistency using Cronbach’s alpha reliability coefficient.
Unlike other psychometric assessment providers, we don’t give a personality score as we don’t believe in grading someone’s personality. This is because there’s no proof that a specific personality cannot suit a certain job. A person can be an introvert and have sales skills, for example. We share the candidates’ profiles, showing their unique traits, and let the recruiters do the math.
Meeting Every Industry’s Hiring Requirements
A successful recruitment process includes testing different factors, and that is the core idea of our tests. Our multi-measure approach assesses a candidate’s skills and characteristics by combining different tests. It can simultaneously assess a candidate’s job-related knowledge, personality, creativity, and judgment. We can customise our multi-measure test based on our client’s industry and specific job description.
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Our skills tests help companies as they don’t have to limit talent acquisition for educational and technical qualifications
For instance, if you’re hiring a Python developer, our tests have questions that assess a candidate’s know-how in Python frameworks, Django, or CSS, as well as questions that test their adaptability to change and their cognitive skills when it comes to managing errors.
A Win-Win for Recruiters and Candidates
More than 6,000 clients have benefited from our pre-employment screening tests, one of these being Bain & Company. As a sought-after global management consulting firm, it receives hundreds of thousands of applications annually. Conventional CV screening is inefficient for them as they miss various skilled candidates.
Bain & Company used our tests and simultaneously conducted their conventional hiring procedure, only to find a visible advantage in our skills-based hiring approach. Using our tests, they could cut down interviews by 30 percent. They have completely switched to our tests to improve the quality and diversity of their workforce and provide a fair chance to deserving candidates.
An Insightful Hiring Experience
We understand that the success of an organisation is predominantly dependent on the quality of its talent, and skills-based hiring is the way to optimise this. I always compare the recruitment process to needles in a haystack. The conventional CV-based hiring procedure focuses on the shiny needles, which are candidates with big brand experience tags. Skills tests help recruiters dive into the haystack, examine every needle, and select the most suitable. That’s precisely what we do.
Our success in customer satisfaction, as seen in G2’s software reviews, is further proof that our skills tests have had a positive impact on businesses’ growth. Our accurate and validated tests will continue helping hiring managers and recruiters to make the right decisions to select and retain candidates who can contribute to their organisation’s long-term success and culture.
