Cos relying on pre-assessments to gauge employee worthiness

Tests help in shortlisting candidates with right behavioural traits along with domain expertise

Firms in India are increasingly realising the importance of assessment tests and are using it in pre-hiring process as it helps in shortlisting candidates with right behavioural traits along with expertise in their domain knowledge, say experts.

Most companies are resorting to these pre-hire assessment tests to gauge an applicant's job worthiness. As these tests help in screening applicants according to their level of qualifications for the specific job.

These pre-assessments tests, mostly administered online, helps companies to select the right hire.

According to assessment platform CoCubes Technologies' Co-founder and CEO Harpreet S Grover, educational institutions have domain specific courses and evaluate students on those lines, whereas, CoCubes PRE-ASSESS (one such assessment tool) evaluates candidates on their domain knowledge, and also on cognitive skills, computer fundamentals and coding skills.

Citing examples, Grover said around one million engineers graduate each year with 60 per cent and above in college but less than 25 per cent are employable leaving a big gap in how colleges are rating as against what corporate want.

"With more data about each candidate in hand than just his/her academic scores, the recruiter is able to shortlist better quality candidates from the available pool," Grover said adding in the current financial year 95,000 students have appeared for pre-assess.

Digital technology services firm UST Global, which has used CoCubes' Pre-Assess for its fresher hiring said: "Out of the 100 candidates who appeared for the drive, 51 were offered which is an excellent final conversion ratio."

Meanwhile, online education firm Udacity which recently partnered with Flipkart to enable interview-less hiring for Flipkart's mobile division, said assessment test undertaken by companies for recruitment, enables more quantitative measure of candidate's capability and helps in shortlisting candidates far more easily than by merely depending on percentage marks.

Vardhan Koshal, Country Manager - India at Udacity said, unlike any other source of talents, a Udacity Nanodegree program student generates enough quantifiable data for traits like technical expertise, problem solving skills and cultural fit/team player for companies to take a hiring decision with much more precision.

Nanodegree is an education credential that is designed to help developers learn new skills and advance their careers in a few months from anywhere on any device at their own pace.

According to skills assessment company MeritTrac, the need of the hour is to systematically improve employability of candidates.

MeritTrac's Graduate Employability Assessment is an Employability Enhancement Program, wherein a student undergoes a diagnosis and review during graduation that offers detailed feedback on students' strengths and weaknesses.

The students are also benchmarked against the industry employability norms so that they understand the gaps.