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@BillBoorman and Sally Hunter

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We scoured presentations and conversations from the last twelve months of TRU events to bring you the best forward-looking ideas in the field of recruiting. 48

8,00010EVENTS

ATTENDEES BIG IDEAS

ASSESSMENTS /03

HIGH-VOLUME, LOW-COST ASSESSMENTS WILL HERALD A NEW AGE OF CANDIDATE MATCHMAKING. THE NEW RECRUITING MANTRA: ATTRACT FEWER APPLICANTS.

Traditional assessments—used by HR executives to screen job candidates—are typically developed by academics who may spend years designing, testing and validating psychometric and skills-based evaluation tools.

Given the high level of investment, assessment companies charge a lot of money to administer

these tests. With per-person fees as high as $2,000, traditional assessments are used for only

a small handful of all candidates a company recruits.

What’s more, because they are so meticulously designed, these types of assessments are

created to last a decade or more without revision. And that’s a problem. The competencies

required in many professions look very different today than they did five years ago. Consider

the role of a pharmaceutical sales executive. The field now demands highly specialized medical

knowledge, expertise with reimbursements and regulation, and consulting skills (compared to

the greater emphasis on traditional sales skills seen a decade ago). Long-run assessment tools

simply can’t adapt fast enough to keep pace with radically shifting talent demands.

ASSESSMENTS /04

HR executives are on the hunt for new and better candidate assessment tools—particularly low-cost, front-end testing that screens all potential job candidates rather than a select few.

HR executives are on the hunt for new and better solutions—particularly low-cost, front-end

assessments that can screen all potential job candidates rather than a select few. They also

need highly efficient tests (e.g. boiling down a 400-question test into as few as a dozen key

questions) that assess personality and cultural fit. And in highly specialized fields (e.g. software

development), HR executives want to test whether candidates truly have the breadth and depth

of knowledge they claim to.

ASSESSMENTS /05

Over the last five years, the number of competitors in the market of low-cost, front-end HR assessments has expanded at an aggressive clip. Among the most interesting entrants to this up-and-coming space:

Smarterer (http://smarterer.com/) verifies candidates’ skills

to make a better job match. The site includes hundreds of

crowdsourced knowledge tests (anyone can submit a test

to the site and receive feedback), and verifies skills using

a combination of scoring and badges. As a social widget,

Smarterer can plug in to any career site.

jobFig (http://www.jobfig.com/) uses personality—or

psychometric—testing to assess job fit, or how well an

individual will fit into a company’s culture. The test is unusual

in its ability to boil down complex assessments into as few as

six or seven questions.

/06ASSESSMENTS

/07

Checkster (http://www.checkster.com/) automates reference

checking. Checkster reaches out to candidates’ professional

contacts (on average six compared to just 2.4 for manual

reference checking) and polls them for a more nuanced view of

a potential candidate. The company also argues its algorithms

prevent fraud more effectively.

SmartHires (http://www.smarthires.com/) also automates

reference checks. A candidate loads in reference names and

contacts, and then the solution seeks out references on the

candidate’s behalf. Since the reference request is initiated

by the candidate rather than the hiring company, and results

are aggregated and anonymized, SmartHire claims it

mitigates the legal risk involved in attesting for (or critiquing)

past employees. (Plus, previous employers are more likely to

be honest when they know their answers will be

mixed with others.)

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eiTalent. (https://eitalent.com/) is an algorithmic tool to

search a candidate’s social content (including social updates,

comments and authored content) and provide a personality

report based on a candidate’s online footprint.

Chemistry Group (http://www.thechemistrygroup.com/)

offers job seekers and hiring companies an “early detection

system,” illustrating how well a particular individual will fit

within an organization even before they apply. A graduate

student, for example, can take a five-minute test to find out

how well their personality matches a variety of participating

companies, or more specifically, a particular division of a single

company. For the oil company BP, for example, Chemistry

Group tested a selection of graduate students BP was actively

trying to recruit, and determined where each candidate would

best fit within the global organization based on intellect,

values, motivations, behaviors and experience.

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/09

The Good Jobs (https://www.thegoodjobs.com/) is the

eHarmony of the assessment marketplace, offering a job

board that matches job seekers and hiring companies based

on psychometric factors.

With all these tools available to hiring companies—and with unit prices substantially lower than

traditional psychometric testing—organizations can assess a broader range of candidates, make

more informed decisions about skills, and study a candidate’s degree of cultural fit. And many

of these tools can be deployed pre-application.

Which raises a profoundly interesting question: Is it possible interviewing will be much less

important in the near future? If it’s now possible to ask candidates before they’ve formally

applied for a position to complete a knowledge assessment (e.g. Smarterer) and skills

assessment (e.g. Smarterer or CodeView), share references (e.g. SmartHires and Checkster)

and a personality profile (e.g. jobFig), and to verify credentials via professional networks

(e.g. LinkedIn), is an interview overkill?

ASSESSMENTS THE GAMIFICATION OF ASSESSING SKILLS

The notion of awarding digital “badges” for specific achievements or skills is quickly gaining acceptance. Badge icons come from the world of gaming, but are now used by training and development organizations to offer a fast and easy visual verification of skills.

Among the pace-setters in this emerging field is Open Badges. The free software offered by Mozilla is an open technical standard any organization can use to create, issue and verify digital badges. Dozens of organizations have joined Open Badges to date, including top-tier universities, professional associations and corporations.

4�e Tru FilesGAMIFICATION

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To learn more about how companies are using gaming strategies to assess candidates and improve the recruiting process experience, download the Gamification eBook.

➔ DOWNLOAD HERE

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WHY ASSESSMENTS MATTER MORE THAN EVER For both recruiters and hiring companies, it’s critical to understand how assessments relate to profound changes in the way companies will secure talent. We’re about to share ideas with you that will up-end the field of recruiting in the next five years.

We can all agree the resume is an impractical tool to evaluate an individual’s job suitability. It’s

simply an inventory of academic credentials and previous work that communicates little about

true ability, knowledge, or personality. LinkedIn offers a bit more: references and endorsements

from colleagues, as well as a greater understanding of what issues interest a candidate. And yet,

a hiring manager needs much more to pull out one talented candidate from a sea of hundreds.

Hiring companies also need more because the nature of work has changed. High-growth

organizations no longer want to hire employees (particularly knowledge workers) for long

tenures in stable, static jobs. If a healthcare device manufacturer, for example, wants to consider

expanding and selling its product in Southeast Asia, it will assemble the proper team of market

ASSESSMENTS

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researchers, forecasters, attorneys and regulatory experts to weigh the market’s potential

profitability. These individuals may be company employees, contingent labor, freelancers or

consultants; such categories won’t matter as long as the company is recruiting the very best

talent to solve that specific, critical problem.

But making rapid-fire assessments of skills and fit to assemble such teams simply won’t work

using the tools recruiters have in their tool belts today. Traditional credentials such as past

employers and alma maters don’t convey an individual’s specialized knowledge and skills.

Going forward, recruiters will have to embrace the types of high-volume, low-cost assessment

tools discussed here.

In time we believe even the notion of an application process will become outdated. If artificial

intelligence can analyze the credentials of large pools of people, and select an individual based

on knowledge, skills, personality and availability, it’s easy to see how the traditional application

process is obsolete.

And while it may seem counterintuitive, attracting fewer job applicants is actually a good thing.

Technology will winnow the field of attractive candidates such that only a dozen perfectly suited

candidates will apply for a job—and that bodes well for both applicants and hiring companies.

ASSESSMENTS

Why invite someone to apply, after all, if you’re extremely likely to reject them? In any other business, inviting clients to make a purchase, subjecting them to a long and time-consuming application process, and then rejecting 99.8 percent of invitees would simply be considered abysmal customer service.

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Why invite someone to apply, after all, if you’re extremely likely to reject them? In any other

business, inviting clients to make a purchase, subjecting them to a long and time-consuming

buying process, and then rejecting 99.8 percent of invitees would be considered abysmal

customer service. And yet most recruiting practices are designed to do just that. Rather than

find the perfect candidate, they are more focused on rejecting legions of applicants. High-

quality, artificial intelligence-driven assessments have the potential to tranform recruiting and

refocus efforts on locating and truly recruiting viable candidates.

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One of the biggest shifts

we see in the assessments

market is the ability to use

these tools much earlier

in the candidate attraction

and hiring process. Rather

than assess only the three

finalists, why not assess

100 applicants?

Easier said than done.

Before shopping for

assessment tools, take a

close look at your hiring

process, and what types

of assessments (e.g.

sourcing, psychometric,

skills, reference checking)

you would like to introduce

at which stages? What

value will each serve and

which are priorities within

your organization? While

psychometric testing all

candidates may seem

attractive, for example,

it’s possible your biggest

priority is sourcing a stronger

pool of applicants.

ASSESSMENTS: ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS

MAP YOUR CURRENT NEEDS

And remember: Assessment

technology is but one set

of solutions within a much

larger portfolio of talent

attraction and hiring

technologies (a set that

includes applicant sourcing,

tracking, video interviewing

and social recruiting).

Consider a holistic approach

to talent-related technology,

rather than considering each

solution independently.

/14ASSESSMENTS: ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS

MAP YOUR FUTURE NEEDSAs you weigh technology

decisions, also consider

what you will need three

years from now rather than

what you want today.

Too many organizations

fail to appreciate the pace

of change within their HR

and recruiting departments,

and make time-consuming

technology adoption

decisions that must

be replaced within

12–18 months.

Think about how your

recruiting strategy is

evolving, and what a

future state may look like.

Place calls to current

vendors and find out their

plans for future add-ons.

For example, your applicant

tracking system may be

readying a new feature you

are considering purchasing.

➔ DOWNLOAD HERE ➔ DOWNLOAD HERE

�e Tru FilesSOURCING TECHNOLOGY

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�e Tru FilesVIDEO INTERVIEWING

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For more information about other technologies in the

recruiter’s arsenal, download the Video Interviewing and

Sourcing Technology eBooks.

ASSESSMENTS /15

I first discovered the Unconference concept when I led a track at #RecruitFest in Toronto in

1999. I was taken aback by the way discussion flowed and how different the format was to a

traditional conference. I led a track all day under a tree and learnt far more than I gave.

Two months later and back in the UK, we ran the first #truLondon at Canary Wharf in November

2009. Today, we’re running dozens of #tru events a year across Europe, North America, Africa

and the Asia-Pacific. Thousands of recruiters, HR leaders and providers come together in an

informal spirit of information sharing and networking.

#tru is based on the BarCamp principle, which means that everybody can be an active

participant instead of listening to speakers and watching presentations all day. The emphasis is

on communication and the free exchange of ideas and experiences where the participants fuel

the conversations.

THE #TRU STORY

BILL BOORMAN

/16

Why? Because assessment tools simply can’t adapt fast enough to keep pace with radically

shifting talent demands. Traditional assessment tools and processes are failing to tell HR teams

and hiring managers what they really need to know about the suitability of candidates. Resumes

offer little more than an inventory of academic credentials and previous work¬; Interviews are

time consuming and favour specific personality traits over others. Both communicate very little

about true ability, knowledge, or personality of a candidate.

Both recruiters and hiring companies are experiencing profound changes in the way they need

to secure talent. They are challenged to match hiring to specific business problems, and rapid-

fire assessments of skills and cultural fit simply don’t work using the tools recruiters have in their

tool belts today.

More importantly, however, the very notion of attracting a large volume of unsuitable candidates

for a single job opening is being called into question. When many recruitment processes are

simply seeking one ideal candidate, what is the purpose of attracting many applicants that are

extremely likely to be rejected? The logic is flawed and it’s making the candidate experience less

than optimal. Why disappoint a higher number of candidates than is necessary and run the risk of

them not applying for a more suitable position when the time comes.

Making more informed hiring decisions to meet rapidly evolving business problems is the

challenge. This Tru file e-book has the insights to meet them: Assessments @BillBoorman.

ATTRACT FEWER APPLICANTS: THIS IS THE NEW RECRUITMENT MANTRA

SALLY HUNTER

SALLY HUNTER, RPO Practice Lead EMEA for the Kelly Outsourcing & Consulting Group

Sally is responsible for the RPO proposition from client relationships via the account management team to consulting on HR transformation. She has extensive experience in the human capital sector, including leadership positions within strategic account management for staffing providers to operational delivery. Sally has also been on the ‘buy/client’ side leading transformational efficiency projects, that have included the outsourcing of large scale recruitment and learning operations. As an independent Consultant, Sally has worked with a number of clients to build the business case for change and shape their HR model in the context of outsourcing partnerships.

ASSESSMENTS

For more thought leadership go to talentproject.com

EXIT

This information may not be published, broadcast, sold, or otherwise distributed without prior written permission from the authorized party. All trademarks are property of their respective owners. An Equal Opportunity Employer. © 2014 Kelly Services, Inc.

ABOUT KELLY SERVICES®

Kelly Services, Inc. (NASDAQ: KELYA, KELYB) is a leader in providing workforce solutions. Kelly® offers a

comprehensive array of outsourcing and consulting services as well as world-class staffing on a temporary,

temporary-to-hire, and direct-hire basis. Serving clients around the globe, Kelly provided employment to

approximately 540,000 employees in 2013. Revenue in 2013 was $5.4 billion. Visit kellyservices.com and connect

with us on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Download The Talent Project, a free iPad® app by Kelly Services.

TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE FUTURE OF RECRUITING, DOWNLOAD THE FOLLOWING TRU FILES EBOOKS.

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�e Tru FilesNEW ROLE OF THE RECRUITER

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