Hire the Right Talent with Custom Assessments to Achieve Big

In the ever-evolving world of recruitment, staying competitive means more than just filling roles quickly. It’s about finding the right talent—efficiently and effectively—while ensuring a positive candidate experience. But with the challenges of traditional hiring methods still looming large, how can companies truly transform their recruitment process?

The answer lies in science-backed custom assessments. Grounded in extensive research, these tailored evaluation tools provide organizations with validated, data-driven insights that not only streamline the hiring process but also significantly reduce bias and enhance candidate engagement.

Let’s explore how custom assessments can revolutionize your recruitment efforts, backed by real statistics and actionable steps.

The Recruitment Struggles HR Professionals Face Today

Recruiters and HR professionals are well aware of the challenges that come with traditional hiring methods. According to SHRM’s 2024 Talent Trends Report, over 3 in 4 organizations have struggled to recruit for full-time regular positions in the past year. 

Among the top reasons for these difficulties are a low number of applicants (60%), competition from other employers (55%), and an increase in candidate “ghosting” (46%). Despite some improvements since 2022, the shortage of qualified candidates remains a pressing issue for businesses across industries.

Furthermore, many organizations still rely on subjective assessments and resumes, which can fail to uncover a candidate’s true potential. In fact, 55% of HR professionals say they’ve found it difficult to recruit for positions requiring new skills due to organizational growth and changing technologies. 

This indicates a pressing need for more objective and reliable evaluation methods, such as custom talent assessments, to bridge the gap between hiring demands and the available workforce.

Many organizations still rely heavily on subjective judgments and resumes, which often fail to reveal a candidate’s true abilities and potential.

Some common pitfalls of traditional methods include:

• Bias and subjectivity: Unconscious bias often sneaks into resume reviews and interviews.
• Time-consuming manual processes: Sorting through hundreds of resumes and scheduling multiple interviews can take weeks if not months.
• Missed potential: Candidates who may excel in key areas could be overlooked due to irrelevant hiring criteria.

These challenges point to a need for a more objective, streamlined, and effective approach—one that custom assessments are perfectly positioned to provide.

The Impact of Custom Assessments on Hiring Efficiency

Reducing Time-to-Hire

Time-to-hire is a critical metric that significantly impacts both your bottom line and your ability to secure top talent. 2024 Talent Trends Report by SHRM reveals that 47% of HR professionals found it more difficult to recruit for full-time positions in the past year compared to the year prior. As competition for talent remains fierce, every day spent without the right hire represents lost productivity and added costs. Positions that require niche skills or senior leadership can take three to six months or longer to fill.

This is where custom assessments can be a game changer. These tools, including Discovered’s AI-powered Applicant Tracking System and Automated Interview Scheduling, help automate the early stages of candidate evaluation. By quickly filtering out unqualified applicants and streamlining interview processes, these features enable your team to focus on the most suitable talent more efficiently.

Here’s how custom assessments help reduce time-to-hire:

• Automated Screening: Candidates are evaluated based on their skills and competencies immediately after applying, saving time spent on manual resume reviews.
• Early Identification of Top Candidates: By filtering applicants early in the process, only the most qualified move forward, enabling faster decisions.
• Focused Interviews: With clear data on candidates’ abilities, interviews become more targeted and efficient, eliminating unnecessary steps and reducing overall time-to-hire.

By implementing custom assessments, you can drastically cut down your time-to-hire, saving valuable time for your recruitment team and ensuring you secure top talent before your competitors.

Improving Candidate Experience

In today’s competitive job market, candidate experience is critical. In 2024, 52% of job seekers have declined a job offer because of poor candidate experience during the hiring journey. This data indicates how significant candidate experience can be.

Custom assessments help to create a smoother, more engaging candidate experience by:

• Providing clarity: Candidates appreciate knowing exactly what skills are being tested and why. Clear, role-specific assessments give them insight into the hiring process.
• Streamlining communication: Automated assessments provide instant feedback, keeping candidates engaged and informed at every stage.
• Saving time: By offering quick evaluations and transparent next steps, candidates feel that their time is respected, boosting their overall impression of your company.

For more insights into improving the candidate experience, check out our article on how to improve candidate experience. 

Key Benefits of Customized Talent Assessments

Here are some of the major advantages of integrating custom assessments into your hiring process:

Reducing Bias with Custom Assessments

Bias in hiring continues to be a significant problem for companies. Companies with biases or limited focus on ethnic and cultural diversity in hiring are missing out, as top-quartile diverse companies achieved 36% higher profitability in 2019, with this gap steadily increasing over recent years.

Custom assessments, combined with tools like Reference Hunter—an automated reference-checking system—are specifically designed to counteract this problem. By ensuring objective reference check automation and unbiased evaluations, these assessments eliminate potential biases and focus solely on skills and qualifications.

How Custom Assessments Mitigate Bias:

• Standardized Evaluations: Every candidate is measured against the same criteria, ensuring fairness across the board.
• Objective Data: Instead of relying on “gut feelings” or first impressions, hiring managers receive data on skills and performance, allowing for more accurate, unbiased decisions.
• Blind Assessments: Some custom assessments can be administered in a way that removes identifying information, further reducing the risk of unconscious bias.

By focusing solely on the skills and competencies needed for the job, custom assessments help create a fairer, more equitable hiring process. 

The Role of Data in Better Hiring Decisions

The use of data in recruitment is no longer optional—it’s essential. 71% of companies now use data analytics in their hiring process, and those that do see significantly better hiring outcomes. Custom assessments provide a wealth of data that can be used to continuously refine and improve your hiring process.

Key Data Points from Custom Assessments Include:

• Skills Proficiency: How well candidates perform in key areas related to the job.
• Candidate Comparisons: Benchmarking data that allows you to compare candidates against each other and industry standards.
• Predictive Performance: Assessment data can be used to predict how well a candidate will perform in the role, reducing the risk of a bad hire.

This data-driven approach leads to more informed decision-making, helping companies not only fill roles faster but also with better-quality candidates who are more likely to thrive in their positions.

How to Implement Custom Assessments: A Step-by-Step Guide

Ready to take action? Implementing custom assessments doesn’t have to be daunting. Here’s a quick guide to get you started:

1. Define Key Competencies: Start by identifying the essential skills and attributes for the role. These will serve as the foundation for your custom assessments.
2. Develop Tailored Assessments: Use assessment tools to create tests that measure the competencies you’ve defined. Ensure that the questions or tasks are relevant to the role.
3. Integrate into Your Process: Incorporate the assessments at an early stage in the recruitment process. This can help filter out unqualified candidates before the interview stage.
4. Analyze Data and Refine: After each hiring cycle, review the data from the assessments to see how well candidates performed and where improvements can be made. Use this feedback to refine future assessments.

The Future of Hiring: Why Custom Assessments Are Essential

As the hiring landscape evolves, custom assessments are becoming not just a competitive advantage but a necessity. With the ability to reduce time-to-hire, minimize bias, and improve the candidate experience, custom assessments offer a modern solution to the challenges of traditional recruitment.

Incorporating custom assessments into your hiring strategy can set your company up for long-term success by ensuring you consistently attract, evaluate, and retain top talent.

Start Transforming Your Hiring Today

At Discovered, we specialize in creating custom assessment solutions tailored to your organization’s needs. Whether you’re a small business or a large corporation, our tools can help streamline your hiring process, reduce bias, and ensure that you’re making data-driven decisions every step of the way.

Ready to get started with smart custom assessments? Schedule your free consultation today and see how custom assessments can elevate your hiring process.