How Recruiters and Staffing Firms Use Soft Skills Assessment Tests

The most successful recruiters and staffing professionals know that soft skills are just as important as hard skills — if not more important when it comes to successful placements. According to LinkedIn, nearly 90% of recruiters attribute bad hires to deficient soft skills, such as communication and organization.

With numbers that high, HR professionals must accurately measure a candidate’s soft skills using skills testing for recruitment. However, unlike hard skills, it can be difficult to accurately gauge soft skills quantitatively. That is where eSkill’s soft skills assessment tests come in.

With eSkill’s user-friendly platform and highly customizable skills testing, recruitment can be a lot easier — and more accurate. By integrating soft skills testing into your recruiting process, you can ensure that you find the candidates with the right job fit, the best match for every position.

How Soft Skills Assessment Tests Work

At eSkill, using skills testing recruitment is a snap. Since the eSkill Talent Assessment Platform can be easily integrated into nearly any applicant tracking system (ATS) software package, you will not waste hours reading resumes from candidates who lack the basic skills needed to be viable for a position. Instead, you can focus your efforts where they will do the most good — on candidates with a strong potential JobFit.

When candidates fill out their applications, you can set your ATS to automatically send them a link to a soft skills test online. Once they take the test, the results will be automatically uploaded to your dashboard, where you can see a ton of information at a glance, including candidate results, the number of tests taken, and overall trends in performance.

With a library of more than 800 pre-made tests, you can choose the test that best fits your needs. Alternatively, you can build your own customized test, either combining existing assessment tools or integrating your company’s own materials. In this way, you can create a skills test that is highly tailored to each position.

eSkill offers a wide variety of tests that are explicitly focused on soft skills, like Following Directions, Attention to Detail, and Logical Thinking. Instead of asking candidates to come to the office to take a paper and pencil test, you can administer your soft skills test online, providing instant, quantified data that you can use to compare candidates.

Quantitative Data on Every Applicant at Your Fingertips

When it comes to skills testing for recruitment, efforts greatly benefit from the data produced in each exam, especially when measuring soft skills. The intuitive dashboard allows you to view results in multiple formats — including bar, pie, and donut charts — while also allowing you to delve into each candidate’s results in detail.

You can break down each applicant’s test score question by question, with each response sorted by difficulty level. You may find that a candidate who scored less than others actually performed very well on more complicated questions, which might mean that they should be considered as a viable candidate for the position.

eSkill even allows you to incorporate audio and video questions, providing greater insight into a candidate’s soft skills. You can set your own rubric regarding how each video question should be scored, setting points that teams can use to grade each candidate. Teams can even provide comments to explain how they reached their score.

Video questions provide the opportunity to see how a candidate will respond to events in real-time. This can help you gauge their communication skills as well as their verbal reasoning ability. With our tools, you can quickly compare candidates without the need for multiple interviews.

Soft Skills Assessment Tests Help with Retention, Too

Ensuring that our hires have the right JobFit is an important part of improving employee retention, which is a key part of any HR strategy. Employee turnover represents a significant cost for companies, and recruiters can do their part by assessing a candidate’s skills, including soft skills.

According to the SHRM, nearly 80% of Americans expect to look for new work in the coming year. This means that recruiters have their work cut out for them.

One of the ways that soft skills testing can help to improve retention is to enhance workplace diversity. Having candidates take a soft skills test online can combat unconscious bias, in which recruiters base their assessments on external factors, often without realizing it.

When you use skills testing, each candidate will be tested equally. You can compare candidates based on their demonstrated talent rather than relying on personal “gut” feelings.