Best Talent Assessment Tools
Buyer's Guide
In a perfect world, finding the ideal candidate is like finding that last jigsaw piece that completes the puzzle. Now imagine if every single jigsaw piece constantly changes shape; that’s the reality of recruitment.
Adapting to ever-changing hiring requirements and talent trends is the need of the hour, and more and more businesses are using talent assessment tools to do just that. This guide will cover what you need to know while searching for a talent assessment tool.
Executive Summary
- Talent assessment tools help businesses streamline the talent selection processes by deploying suitable evaluations and auto-generating test scores.
- The system provides tools to create questionnaires, organize online tests and send emails inviting candidates to participate.
- Asking key questions to vendors about platform capabilities, training resources and additional services helps uncover the benefits and pitfalls of using their solution.
What Are Talent Assessment Tools?
Talent assessment tools are recruiting solutions used by HR professionals to evaluate candidates based on the qualities required for an open role. Talent evaluation solutions administer different tests to collect insights into candidates' compatibility with the work, workforce and workplace.
Typical assessment categories include mental aptitude, cognitive abilities, spoken language and psychometric tests.
Primary Benefits
The main goal of every recruiting team is placing the right person in the right role. But without the right software, your recruitment efforts are like throwing darts in the dark. Equipping your team with talent assessment tools allows them to hit the mark with every hire. Keep reading to learn the top benefits of using talent assessment tools:
Improves Hiring Accuracy
Only screening resumes leave your HR team with no choice but to guess what makes a candidate an ideal match. No wonder 51% of North American recruiters believe the traditional CV is an archaic recruitment tool. Now, the focus is shifting to getting to know the person beyond the resume.
Determining a potential hire’s compatibility requires measuring qualities that aren’t easily quantifiable, like potential, ambition and aspirations, and determining how well those qualities align with the role’s requirements.
The good news is that talent assessment tools develop suitable scoring criteria based on your company's unique talent needs. That way, your hiring efforts are always razor-sharp, specific and relevant to who and why you're hiring.
Predicts Role-specific Success
The longer a position remains open, the higher the expenses from loss in productivity and ever-increasing recruitment costs. Yet, expediting hiring can be catastrophic for your business since it increases the chances of bad hires. Acquiring talent requires more finesse than just hiring to fill a vacancy.
Talent assessment tools help you define the qualities that make a candidate an ideal match for a specific role. The system generates assessments based on internal talent requirements and industry standards to generate robust role-based benchmarks for successful hiring.
Creates Balanced Talent Pipelines
Diversity matters, and modern job seekers expect tangible DEI efforts from potential employers. In fact, a recent study by Jobvite revealed that 44% of candidates turned down an interview or job offer due to a lack of diversity in the workforce.
The first step towards fair talent management starts as early as the pre-hire assessment phase of the screening process. Manually assessing candidates increases the chances of human error. Subtle details like gender, age and ethnicity can influence your recruiting team, and one wrong decision can snowball into missing out on top talent.
Talent assessment tools enables proper talent selection by evaluating candidates on what matters most: their potential. You’ll have access to objective hiring criteria and assessment results that spotlights the degree of compatibility with the open role.
Certain vendors take things up a notch with advanced targeting and equality monitoring tools that alert your teams when diversity drops below a certain threshold.
Reduces Manual Effort
- Applicant Tracking Systems
- Assessment
- Background Check
- Benefits Administration
- Bookkeeper
- Call Center Workforce Management
- Candidate Relationship Management
- Certified Payroll
- Compensation Management
- Construction Payroll
- Corporate LMS
- Course Creation
- Direct Deposit Payroll
- E-Learning
- Educational
- Elearning Authoring Tools
- Employee Engagement
- Employee Feedback
- Employee Pulse Survey Tools
- Employee Scheduling
- Enterprise LMS
- Farm Payroll
- Healthcare Learning Management Systems
- HR Case Management
- HR
- HR Software For Nonprofits
- Human Services
- Interview Scheduling
- Job Board
- Leave Management
- LMS For Schools
- LMS
- Mobile Workforce Scheduling
- Nurse Scheduling
- Onboarding
- Online Course Platforms
- Online HR
- Online Learning Platforms
- Online Training
- Payroll
- Payroll Software For Mac
- PEO
- Performance Management
- Pre-Employment Assessment
- Recruiting CRM
- Recruitment
- Restaurant Scheduling
- Sales Commission
- Succession Planning
- Talent Acquisition
- Talent Intelligence
- Talent Management
- Time and Attendance
- Time Clock
- Training Management System
- Tutoring
- Video Interview
- Virtual Classroom
- Workforce Management
For each open role, your team is at the frontline contacting candidates, scheduling interviews and monitoring candidate pipelines. Keeping up with the highs and lows of recruitment contributes to stress and burnout, and dealing with complex candidate responses might be the straw that breaks the camel's back.
Letting the system perform heavy and repetitive work like creating applicant profiles, processing responses and generating error-free scorecards saves your team from drowning in never-ending administrative tasks.
Key Features & Functionality
| Candidate Assessments | Develop personalized and branded assessments with role-specific performance benchmarks o measure a candidate’s capabilities, competencies and qualities accurately. Choose from various categories like behavioral patterns, personality traits, language skills, technical skills and cognitive abilities. |
|---|---|
| Talent Databases | Stores applicant details, scorecards and documents with additional attachments like team notes and comments in accessible databases. Saves questionnaires and job profiles for quick access when future positions open. |
| Predictive Profiles | Rely on auto-generated candidate profiles that display key information, scores and overall ratings. Transform candidate responses into actionable insights that assist hiring decision-makers in making optimal hiring decisions. |
| Automated Workflows | Rely on process automation to streamline assessments and job analysis to improve hiring time. Create configurable workflows to send test invites and develop scorecards. |
| Insights and Analytics | Generate templated or ad-hoc reports highlighting hiring criteria and summarizing candidate scores. Leverage evidence-based insights to guide the interview processes and measure candidate responses with a quick reference to ideal answers. |
| ATS Integration | Streamline candidate pipelines by integrating the platform with applicant tracking systems (ATS). Import candidate profiles from the ATS into the testing platform to administer talent assessments. |
Software Comparison Strategy
There are plenty of vendors in the market, but where do you start? You’ll need to analyze how well each vendor addresses your company-specific requirements for a guided software selection process. Follow these steps:
1. Conduct an Internal Analysis
Start internal conversations with your recruiting team to pinpoint weaknesses in internal processes and how software can diagnose talent selection challenges. Use the following points to guide internal discussions:
- Role-specific Requirements: Each role is different regarding responsibilities and seniority levels. Determine what you need to measure for each position. Leverage job requisitions and input from hiring managers to identify required qualities and skills.
- Key Personnel: Involve the people who’ll use the system extensively and ask them what tools they need to improve internal operations.
- Uncover Pain Points: Dissect your existing hiring process and evaluate your recruiting tech to pinpoint where inefficiencies and weaknesses occur.
2. Develop a Requirements List
Based on your company-specific requirements, analyze different features and prioritize the ones you need the most. Separate the must-have features from the good-to-have based on your HCM goals.
For example, to enable objective hiring, look for features that support team collaboration, like sharing notes, adding comments and central access play an important role.
If candidate experience is a top priority, focus on features like personalized communications, mobile-optimized application forms and online assessment tests.
3. Evaluate Different Types of Systems
Next, determine the system suitable for your company’s existing IT infrastructure. Some vendors provide standalone systems that function independently and can integrate with other recruiting tools and productivity apps. This software requires maintaining separate databases and switching between platforms to access information.
Other vendors offer talent assessment tools as part of a more comprehensive recruiting suite solution. With suite solutions, all your information is centrally accessible but requires strong IT support.
To learn more about how comprehensive recruiting software should function, refer to our recruiting software features and requirements checklist curated by our analysts.
4. Compare Vendors
Prioritize your company requirements and evaluate alternatives based on the following key considerations:
- Features and Services: The feature sets and platform capabilities match your requirements list and address the pain points.
- Assessment Categories: Check the range of assessment categories offered by different vendors that go beyond skill evaluations and offer behavioral, cognitive abilities and personality tests. Keep an eye out for vendors that can adapt to ever-changing hiring criteria.
- Integrations: If a suite solution is not your preferred choice, consider how well the system can connect with existing recruiting and hiring technologies.
Need more information? For a more granular software selection process, read our article on how to apply a nine-step lean methodology to select the ideal system.
Cost & Pricing Considerations
Most vendors typically provide services based on tiered pricing, where you pay an annual or monthly subscription fee. The subscription plans determine the depth of the services. The following are the most popular pricing models:
- Pay-per-Recruiter: Pricing tiers depend on the number of users using the platform to develop and deploy candidate assessments.
- Pay-per-Candidate: The number of applicants determines the price. More candidates mean more evaluations. Most vendors provide a limit to the number of assessments you can conduct.
- Pay-per-Module: This pricing model is common with vendors that provide various recruiting services.
Despite the various pricing tiers, additional factors affect pricing:
- Implementation Cost: Setting up a new system usually incurs a one-time or subscription fee, depending on the deployment method.
- Specialized roles: The more extensive your company and user base, the higher the cost.
- Advanced Features: Expect costs to escalate if the software includes advanced tech like AI-enabled features or if you opt for a tailored plan.
The Most Popular Talent Assessment Tools
Now that you know what talent assessment tools can do, how do you decide which product is best for your needs? We’ve curated some of the most popular talent assessment tools on the market. Check out our picks below!
Infor Talent Science
Infor Talent Science offers cloud-based predictive analytics and talent assessment tools to identify, evaluate and develop new hires. Talent intelligence insights uncover deep behavioral patterns and diagnose internal talent gaps. The system generates role-specific hiring criteria validated by I/O psychologists to enable data-confident talent selection and improve personality job fit.
The single-assessment approach holistically evaluates each candidate’s compatibility with the role, workforce and company culture and displays the degree of compatibility with weighted percentages.
Infor Talent Science auto-generates predictive candidate profiles that display results and overall ratings.
Wonderlic
Wonderlic Select, formerly WonScore, is the talent assessment module of the Wonderlic suite. It focuses on fair, data-driven and scientific talent assessments to filter the best-fit candidates and is suitable for businesses of all sizes. The platform uses AI to generate predictive job description profiles that detail the degree of role alignment. Talent assessment categories include motivation, personality and cognitive ability.
Predictive candidate scores spotlight methods to develop suitable development paths and training programs, which stabilize turnover and improve job satisfaction.
Wonderlic’s candidate reports visually represent interpretations of personality traits and recommendations on leveraging insights to set new employees for success. Source
The Predictive Index
The Predictive Index is a cloud-based standalone talent assessment solution. The testing platform provides a range of psychometrics assessment categories, including behavioral, cognitive and job assessments accessible on web browsers. Set suitable job targets and behavioral benchmarks validated by experts to predict job fit accurately.
Native integration allows seamlessly connecting the platform with existing hiring and other HR software.
The assessment center allows HR teams to monitor evaluations, send invite links and share candidate scorecards. Source
TalentQuest
TalentQuest is a cloud-based talent management system that provides pre-employment assessment tools to find, evaluate and hire top talent. The testing platform uses scientifically validated methods to assess personality traits and analyze responses to provide candidate recommendations. Deep talent insights set the basis for role-specific hiring criteria and performance benchmarks ideal for your company’s industry.
TalentQuest lets you set job targets and behavioral tags to assess candidates on role-specific requirements. Source
Questions To Ask
Use the following questions as a starting point to drive internal conversations to guide your software search:
- What’s your budget?
- Which talent assessment categories are ideal for the open roles in your company?
- What skills do you need to measure?
- How many employees will use the software?
- Will implementing the system require additional IT support?
Asking the right questions helps uncover each vendor's advantages and shortcomings:
- How does your software integrate with existing recruiting software and productivity apps?
- Does the system address your industry requirements?
- To what extent does this system remove bias from talent evaluations?
- What are the training and support resources available?
- What are the advanced AI-enabled features?
Next Steps
Successful hiring impacts everyone in your organization. Whether you need to decide between two or two hundred candidates, talent assessment tools help tighten your talent selection efforts to pinpoint the best match. Armed with the right talent insights, you can build productive workforces and have the right people on board at all times.
Ready to start your software search? Consider referring to our comparison report to select your ideal system.
Product Comparisons
Additional Resources
Top 10 Talent Assessment Tools Leaders by Analyst Rating (of 78 products)
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