How To Assess Technical Competencies In A Professional Manner?

One of the most critical aspects of hiring candidates comes with assessing their technical competencies. Such talents are nowhere mentioned in the resumes or the certificates provided by the candidates. It is up to the managers to choose the best candidates based on their technical abilities. Remember that this is not a simple job as the candidates are familiar with the regular method of tests and they often come prepared for such tests. In this regard, you may not be able to choose the right candidates unless you have a well developed technical skills assessment process in your organization.

The best thing you can do in this situation is to rely on the ready to use tests developed by professional companies that specialize in this segment. In this way, you will be able to understand the real talent of the candidates attending the interviews. Gone are the days when companies used to provide a multiple-choice question format test to the candidates and select them based on their results. Apart from that, it is no longer a good idea to rely on the experience and grades of the candidate as they do not reflect the technical abilities of the candidate.

Going beyond multiple-choice question format

Even though this is a decent enough method to assess the skills of the candidate, it is not the complete method and it can be effectively used in conjunction with other methods. This is often the first method to filter candidates who do not even have the basic skills required to handle the job. This method can eliminate at least half of the candidates in most cases. However, you should not rely on this completely as this can be misleading in many cases. In some cases, the candidates may be lucky with the answers as they can even select an option even without understanding the question. There is no way to determine if the candidate actually knew the answer of if he was guessing the answer to the multiple-choice questions.

Using case lets to identify the skills of the candidates

In this method, the candidates are given multiple problems to handle and they have to provide comprehensive solutions to those problems. In this manner, the way they approach any particular problem can be identified and this is a far better method than the regular question and answer format. When the candidates have to think on the spot to resolve problems, their real problem-solving ability will come into the picture.

Why is this approach important? 

If you are wondering why such an approach is needed to select candidates, you need to understand that the real-world problems faced by companies are drastically different from what is being taught in colleges and universities across the world. Apart from that, candidates from different backgrounds have different methods of training depending on their qualification and previous experience. Considering this situation, it makes a lot of sense to analyze how they handle any particular problem in a real-world situation.

Apart from that, the way they look into the problem as a whole and provide comprehensive solutions can be assessed by the hiring team. This is also beneficial in many ways as the human resource team can use similar caselets for many candidates. In this way, it becomes easy to see how different candidates approach the problem and the HR team will be able to compare the performance of multiple candidates in a short duration of time.

Using case study simulator

The case study simulator will be the best tool to filter the candidates in the final rounds of interview. During this stage, real-world problems will be simulated during the test and candidates have to work on providing the solutions in real-time. In this manner, their technical abilities will be exposed completely and the HR team can get good insights by conducting such skills test on the candidates. This will also save lots of time as you can choose practical examples that were earlier faced by your team members in the real-world projects. In this way, you can completely analyze the technical abilities of the candidates.

Not only that, you will be surprised to know that when you choose such methods, you can even get an alternate approach to resolving your real-world problems. Some companies also choose such methods to boost the creative thinking of the team members. Apart from helping the HR team to choosing the right candidates, this test can also be used to understand the technical skills of your existing team.

Help your team to think out of the box

In most cases, companies have a standard method of working and all the employees usually follow the same method as a coordinated effort is needed to handle various projects. Even though this is a good approach as there is uniformity with regards to the technical process, it limits the abilities of the team members in the long run. When people work in such environments for a long duration, their creative ability goes down by a huge margin. In order to keep the spirits alive, you need to exercise the technical skills of your team members on a regular basis.

The best thing any team leader can do is to put the team members in this simulation test and ask them to come up with innovative solutions. When the team members are not bound by specific rules to resolve the problems, they may come up with innovative ideas by thinking out of the box. In some cases, such ideas have helped companies to come up with products and services that are more advanced than the competitors. Even you can choose this approach to build the team spirit and boost the technical skills of your candidates. These are some of the major advantages of going beyond the standard method of testing the candidates for their technical competencies. You will reap rich benefits by adopting such methods to hire the right candidates for your projects.