Is your hiring process facing issues like high turnover, recruiter burnout, or poor culture fits? You’re not alone. So, how do you tackle these challenges to make better hiring decisions, boost productivity, and strengthen your company culture? The answer often lies in pre-employment assessments–but how do you choose the right assessment vendor for your needs?
With 82% of companies now using assessments in their hiring process, the benefits are clear. Companies incorporating assessments see a 74% increase in hiring efficiency, a 50% reduction in hiring costs, and a significant decrease in time-to-hire, from 27 days to just 7.
However, with hundreds of vendors on the market, choosing the right partner can feel overwhelming, especially when you’re working within budget, timeline, or internal resistance constraints. We’ll walk you through a proven framework to help you identify the right assessment vendor for your specific needs.
Understand Your Needs and Constraints
When you’re trying to choose the right assessment vendor, it’s essential to know what challenges you’re trying to solve and what limitations you face. Here are some common constraints organizations encounter:
- Budget: A tight budget may limit you to vendors offering more generic, off-the-shelf solutions rather than personalized assessments.
- Needs: You may require multiple assessment types for different stages, narrowing your pool to vendors that can handle a more complex solution.
- Resistance: Internal resistance may mean you need a vendor who can provide support to help sell the value of assessments to stakeholders.
- Timeline: If your timeline is short, you may need to prioritize vendors with quick, off-the-shelf options over those requiring customization
A Framework for Choosing the Right Assessment Vendor
Here’s a strategic framework to help guide your decision-making:
Define Your Challenge and Assess the Cost: Before choosing a vendor, clearly define the problem you’re trying to solve. For example, are you trying to reduce turnover in a key role? Or are you focusing on hiring candidates who fit your company culture? Once the challenge is identified, tie it to key performance indicators (KPIs) and use historical data to establish a baseline. Quantify the cost of this challenge to your organization to create urgency and justify investment in assessments.
Tip: Build an impact assessment model to showcase the current cost of your hiring challenges to senior executives.
Identify the Right Approach: Assessment vendors offer a range of approaches, from off-the-shelf solutions to custom-built assessments. Here’s a breakdown of the pros and cons:
Select the Right Assessment Types: Choose assessments that align with your hiring needs and measure the most critical competencies for your roles.
Tip: Use employee benchmarking to analyze the traits of your most successful hires, and then select assessments that evaluate those competencies.
Align Assessments with Your Hiring Process: One common concern is that adding assessments might slow down the hiring process or discourage top candidates from applying. To avoid this, find a vendor whose assessments are modular, mobile-first, customizable, and WCAG-2 compliant. Work with vendors that can evaluate your hiring process holistically and recommend solutions that integrate smoothly without disrupting applicant flow.
Narrowing Down the Vendor Pool
With so many vendors to choose from, how do you refine your list? Here are key factors to consider when evaluating potential assessment partners:
- Personalization: Will they work with your team to tailor your assessment to your unique roles and culture?
- Collaboration: Will they truly partner with your team and tap into their subject matter expertise?
- I-O Teams: Do they have Industrial-Organizational Psychologists on staff to build and locally validate your assessment?
- Candidate Experience: Is the assessment user-friendly, accessible, and built for mobile?
- ATS Integrations: Do they offer seamless integration with your applicant tracking system?
- Data-Driven Approach: Do they use research and data to understand what success in the role looks like?
- Scalability: Do they have a full suite of capabilities so the solution can grow as your business grows?
Conclusion
Choosing the right assessment vendor requires a clear understanding of your challenges, constraints, and long-term goals. By following this framework–defining your problem, selecting the right approach, and evaluating vendors based on personalization, collaboration, and data-driven solutions–you can significantly improve your hiring efficiency, reduce costs, and find a partner that grows with your business.