What You Need to Know About Behavioral Assessments vs. Skills Assessments

Evaluating resumes and cover letters typically reveals only surface-level information about the candidates. Everyone strives to present themselves in the best light, making it necessary to use additional tools to gauge whether an individual is compatible with the vacancy requirements. 

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Many recruiters rely on background checks. Although these can give stellar results, they don’t always highlight a candidate’s relevant competencies and potential. 

Thus, if a company doesn’t have a top-notch Applicant Tracking Software (ATS) that ensures compliance, it could face challenges that can be costly to reverse. Therefore, recruitment teams should use all available support to determine whether they have found a suitable job applicant. 

That’s where behavioral and skills assessments enter the picture. These tools help recruiters get a more well-rounded understanding of the candidates and their abilities, motivation, and goals. 

Here’s everything you should know about these assessments. 

What are Behavioral Assessments?

Behavioral assessments stand for pre-employment tests that analyze job applicants’ personality profiles and determine how suitable they are for a job opening. These tools aim to evaluate whether an individual has the necessary potential, work style and if they would be a good culture fit. 

Recruiters use these insights to understand how a candidate would perform in the workplace and whether they share a company’s values, goals, and mission. Although these assessments also reveal various valuable information about one’s character and affinities, they aren’t the same as personality tests. 

But behavioral evaluations show how workers would behave in an environment without highlighting their character types. It is wise to use evaluations that provide more depth and are multi-faceted, such as behavioral assessments. Apart from using only personality tests, these tools show a candidate’s ability to adapt to different situations and learn. 

As a result, recruiters get a more accurate picture of how job applicants would act in their companies and whether they could handle their daily responsibilities. Instead of only revealing hard-wired characteristics, behavioral assessments show growth and development possibilities. 

They pinpoint candidates with compatible habits, traits, and temperaments, ensuring recruiters detect individuals who could deliver stellar results. That helps minimize the risk of hiring the wrong person and endangering team performance.

READ MORE: How Personality Tests Became a Recruitment Trend

Types of Behavioral Assessments

Recruiters can introduce various behavioral assessments to the recruitment process. They vary in time and depth, but every evaluation can reveal valuable information about the candidates. 

Here are the most common types.

• Rating-scale – These questions enable job applicants to choose a number that best describes how they act or feel in a given situation. 
• Multiple-choice – This behavioral assessment test allows candidates to select the most suitable answer based on the question.
• Adjectives Index – This checklist enables job applicants to pick the words closest to how they would behave or feel in various scenarios.
• Open-ended Inquiries – Candidates can write their own answers, allowing recruiters to understand them better. 
• One-way Video Interviews – Job applicants receive questions before the interview and record their answers via a video platform. 

RESOURCES: Discover interview questions you can use to find the best fit for your company.

Benefits of Behavioral Assessments

Recruiters can expect the following advantages when using behavioral assessments:

Simplifying the Selection Process

Behavioral assessments are a stellar tool for producing quantifiable and unbiased data, giving recruiters insights that streamline the selection process and let them know how compatible a candidate is with the job opening requirements. As a result, they can find the best match with more ease instead of solely relying on resumes and cover letters.

Increased Merit-Based Hiring

Unconscious bias is among the worst enemies of successful and equitable recruitment. Behavioral assessments enable recruiters to evaluate job applicants according to their traits, potential, abilities, and habits. 

Boosts Data-Driven Decision-Making

Behavioral assessment tests are the product of data scientists’ and psychologists’ collaboration, making them data-driven, accurate, and credible. As a result, recruitment teams increase efficiency and make better-informed decisions. 

Higher Quality of Hire

Companies use behavioral assessments to identify top talents and those who fit their values, objectives, and requirements. Thanks to that, they improve the quality of hire and increase ROI.

Efficient Job Previews

Behavioral assessments typically include questions and potential scenarios that give candidates a snippet of their daily responsibilities. That can help weed out under-qualified job applicants and those who would be a poor culture fit. 

Team Diversification

Recruiters are only humans and could overlook quality candidates if they don’t fit every job requirement or lack the experience. But behavioral assessments highlight everyone who would do well in the job role, even if they don’t have all the qualities recruitment teams seek. 

What are Skills Assessments?

Skills assessment tests enable recruitment teams to gauge the abilities of their employees and candidates. As a result, they can determine if an individual possesses the necessary competencies to perform a job role efficiently. 

Although HR professionals can use them to determine skill gaps and plan upskilling and reskilling programs, they typically use them in the selection process. These tools help them pinpoint under-qualified candidates and shortlist top talents.

For example, the global skills assessment market size reached $1.93 billion in 2020 and will likely hit $5.64 billion by 2030. They enable HR departments to determine the most compatible job applicants according to their abilities and improve the quality of hire. 

Additionally, skills assessments help them understand whether an individual has what it takes to perform the job role successfully. 

Types of Skills Assessment Tests

Recruiters can use the following skills assessments:

• Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, Conscientiousness (DISC) – This test is more flexible and adaptive than the commonly used personality tests, giving recruiters insights into how candidates would perform their jobs and respond to various challenges. That helps them improve teamwork, conflict resolution, and employee productivity.
• 12 Driving Forces – HR professionals use this test to discover what motivates a candidate and why they do what they do. Therefore, this test measures strength and motivation behind behaviors using six motivators: knowledge, utility, surroundings, others, power, and methodology. They can determine their professional growth potential and work performance. 
• Emotional Intelligence (EISA) – This test pinpoints candidates’ emotional quotient, development opportunities, and personality strengths.
• Competencies (TNA) – Recruiters use this test to identify a candidate’s top personal skills depending on how they score on 25 research-based abilities employers typically require. 
• Acumen Capacity Index (ACI) – This test analyzes a job applicant’s keenness and depth of discernment perception. Therefore, it lets recruiters know how candidates perceive themselves and understand the patterns around them.

The Advantages of Skills Assessments

In a nutshell, here are the top benefits of using skills assessment.

Reveal Misleading CVs

Seventy-eight percent of resumes include deceiving information, and 46 percent contain lies. However, skills assessment tests enable HR professionals to verify whether candidates possess the abilities they claim to have. 

Moreover, it lets them know if they can use their competencies for the job role and get positive results. 

Identify Skills Gaps

Formal education alone is not always the best indicator of one’s competency. For instance, a candidate might have the necessary background but lack relevant skills. 

Recruiters use these assessments to identify whether job applicants miss crucial knowledge and abilities and if they can develop them over time. 

Reduce Employee Turnover

According to the research by Aberdeen Group, pre-hire evaluations give data-driven insight that helps minimize employee turnover. Skills assessments reveal whether job applicants have the necessary competencies, knowledge, and motivation and provide a job preview. 

That often leads to under-qualified candidates quitting the selection process and understanding whether the position aligns with their goals. 

Increases Employee Engagement

Skills assessments allow recruiters to understand candidates better before hiring them. They get a more in-depth picture of job applicants’ abilities and what drives their goals and performance. 

As a result, companies can provide better growth opportunities, reinforce performance, and detect potential challenges. That leads to higher job satisfaction and engagement. 

Are Behavioral and Skills Assessments Necessary for Business Success?

Behavioral and skills assessments aren't the only recruitment tools HR professionals should use to identify the most compatible candidate, but they help get more objective and data-driven insights. Job applications recruiters receive usually touch on the surface only, not giving them a deeper understanding of whether someone possesses relevant abilities and knowledge. 

No surprise that the use of these tests in the US is increasing. Many businesses use behavioral and skills assessments to ensure they have the best match and to improve the quality of hire. 

They can use them separately or within an Applicant Tracking Software (ATS). But regardless of how HR professionals use them, these tools simplify the recruitment process, highlight stellar candidates, and help drive business success.

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Recruitment speed plays a significant role in candidate experience and job satisfaction. Hence, recruiters need reliable support, including AI-driven recommendations and behavioral and skills assessments.

Try Manatal today and see how you can include assessments into your recruitment process. Discover how our cloud-based SaaS can benefit your business by starting your 14-day Free Trial now.