“Can assessments and a positive candidate experience peacefully coexist?”
Gerry Crispin, co-founder of CareerXroads and the TalentBoard, has an answer: Candidates do not hate assessments at all. What they hate is engaging in a hiring process that seems unfair. Perceptions of fairness are driven by many things, including where the assessment falls in the talent acquisition workflow, whether candidates understand the value of the assessment, and what kind of feedback candidates get about the assessment.
But the No. 1 factor in job candidates’ positive feelings about an assessment is a clear link between the content of the assessment and the job they are applying to (also known as “face validity”).
The idea that candidates drop out of the process due to the length of an assessment is a myth. Candidates disengage from the process when they feel their time is being wasted by irrelevant questions delivered in what appears to be a vacuum.
Crispin talks more about this in the podcast below, and provides ideas for those who want to make pre-hire assessments a value-add to the candidate experience.