What is the best predictor of job performance?
Omer Molad is the Co-founder and CEO of the skills testing platform, Vervoe. Molad and the team believe in a better way for hiring managers and recruiters to hire the best candidates for roles. Instead of the standard interview process, Molad believes that using a skills test is a more useful measurement of candidate suitability for a job.
What is a skills assessment?
Molad defines a skill as something someone can learn. Skills develop, regress, and change over time. Someone might have a skill naturally, or they might develop a specific skill over time.
With this in mind, a skills test is an assessment used to provide an unbiased, validated evaluation of a candidate’s ability to perform the duties listed in the job description.
In the same way, an actor will audition for a role they want in a movie, a candidate will audition for a role using a pre-employment skill test.
Vervoe
With Vervoe, employers build customizable skills assessments that test candidates’ job-ready skills, from technical to soft skills. A candidate can demonstrate their skills with these assessments so employers have the confidence to choose the best applicant based on the assessment results.
The assessment results are automatically graded and candidates are ranked based on how well they performed on each skill. From here, a company can easily see who among their candidates is the most capable of succeeding in the position based on their current level of real-life skills.
Problems with the Interview Process
Candidates typically undergo a series of interviews, with recruiters and hiring managers to decide who is the best fit. Vervoe reimagines the traditional hiring process by allowing candidates to showcase their talent and therefore delivering a more accurate indicator of a candidate’s ability to do the job.
Traditional interviewing has several issues that Vervoe tries to solve. Molad believes that there are two main problems with the conventional hiring process.
Interviews DO NOT predict performance
In an interview, a candidate has to answer questions about their resume and past experience. Molad believes that these kinds of questions are ineffective when determining how suitable a candidate is for a role. One’s past experience at a company or in a similar role may have little to nothing to do with the skillset an organization needs from them now.
He also says interviews are ineffective because some people may not be suitable for the role, but they might be good at interviewing. These are the candidates who are confident and project themselves well. While these are good skills to have, Molad argues that they have little relevance to doing the actual job.
The interviewee may simply give the interviewer answers they want to hear based on their resume. The interview does not show how capable the candidate is at doing the day-to-day work needed in the role.
Time Constraints
According to Molad, the other problem with interviews is how time-consuming they can be. A company might receive one hundred applications for a role, but it will be impossible to interview all candidates. So, a company will screen the number of candidates down to a handful based on a resume or phone screen.
The problem with this process is that some people have the skills but aren’t good at marketing themselves. These people might not have the most impressive resume or might not be very good at expressing themselves in an interview format, but their skills are exactly what the role needs. Molad argues that companies want people who can do the job, not those who can excel in the interview.
As a result, the interview process can hinder the ability of the right talent to get the job.
There is also a concern for interview bias. If a company needs to fill a role, a recruiter will be pressured to hire someone among their applicants. Instead of screening for the best skill set, or even the best answers, recruiters may just rely on their bias toward who they like the best or who would make it easiest to fill the role. The team might end up with someone who has poor chemistry with the rest of the team, or who can’t do the job well.
The bad hire effect
The hiring process is essential for any size organization, but one bad hire will affect some companies more than others. Most of the economy consists of smaller businesses, and these smaller businesses have employees who work closely together.
A larger company with thousands of employees who hires one employee who slows operations down maybe in little danger, as one bad hire will not always affect operations at a business level.
That being said, for businesses that rely on high-level collaboration within cross-functional teams, such as contemporary Software businesses, that one bad hire can be catastrophic. Nowhere will a mis-hire be felt more sharply than in a team that relies on the collective skills of a small close-knit team working on tight timeframes.
Recruiters + Vervoe
Incorporating Vervoe’s skills assessment approach into a recruiting process allows today’s recruiters to spend less time on highly repetitive, top-of-funnel activities and more time further down the funnel on the more value and insight-led activities.
Working together with their hiring managers, recruiters can customise pre-existing assessments to suit their specific needs. Going into interviews with a pre-qualified level of skills allows both recruiters and hiring managers to spend more time assessing values alignment and effective methods of working.
In highly competitive markets, the margins for error when hiring are consistently shrinking. Vervoe is a great addition to recruiting infrastructure and one that we believe can make a massive impact on hiring quality and therefore business performance.
