2 weeks ago the Rectec team once again set up camp at one of the premier in-house recruitment events of the year, IHR Bristol.
As usual, we were surrounded by the great and the good in the recruitment, HR and tech world – visionaries and industry stalwarts both, decking out the good halls of Ashton Gate and connecting with inhousers across the South West and Wales.
The IHR Bristol event was, as always, a smashing success – not only were we able to engage with new users of Rectec Compare, but we were able to fly the flag for our vendor partners via our stacked Swag Table and reconnect with co-exhibitors who are partners on our Comparison and Marketplace platforms.
The story of the show.
Every show has its rhythms and its stories, driven by guests, speakers and exhibitors all coming together to share best practices and bond over our little slice of the HR world.
We’ve found in the few years of hitting the event circuit that every event becomes somewhat of a recruitment culture weathervane. As Rectec is tech-agnostic, our exhibit becomes a focal point for free-wheeling ideas-sharing over tech, the future of recruitment, talent and tech snags, tech purchasing pain points and how the industry is changing in the hybrid era.
The story of this year’s IHR Bristol was all to do with assessments, and how assessment tech has fast become the front line of recruitment agility and specificity in the war for talent.
Assessment technology – what is and why is so important?
Bolstering recruitment efforts with assessments is hardly anything new – almost everyone reading this blog will have at some point have had a skills test or a technical thrown at them during an interview process.
So why are assessments suddenly a hot topic? Do people actually want more assessment tools, or simply ones that work better? And perhaps most importantly, how is assessment data being utilised and does it really make any difference to hiring outcomes?
Context is, as with everything, key. We’re going to look at the answers to the above and more through two contextual lenses – Big Data, and how it fundamentally makes assessments better; and candidate connection in a hyper-personalised recruitment environment.
The war against siloing Big Data, and the future of candidate skills development.
Big Data has the potential to revolutionise every digital touchpoint across the hiring spectrum. But speedy integration or grasping at the most accessible or affordable plug-and-play solution will not improve hiring outcomes without understanding how, where and why data is so important.
Assessment platforms are absolute troves of data, but the first mistake anyone can make when considering the use of data assessment tools to gather, clean and use data is siloing.
By this, we mean consciously limiting what data can do and where it can be applied.
This is done typically by only using assessments – and the data gleaned from answers to those assessments – at one point in the interview process.
The data generated by assessments is so much more valuable when utilised in a long-term L&D strategy. Think of it this way – assessment answers give a snapshot of candidate ability in a single moment, and that moment decides whether or not a hiring manager hires or doesn’t hire that person.
But the results of that assessment – the data that shows an employee’s strengths and weaknesses in high definition, and how competent they are in any given field – provide the foundation for long-term talent skills development.
Assessment data, when seen as part of an employee development strategy, is the compass that drives improvement. Assessment Big Data provides that foundation. It sets a developmental context and a benchmark for staff investment and skills improvements. And, as any good recruiter knows, investment in staff development is talent retention gold dust.
This is why so many guests to our IHR stand were talking about assessment tools and the development of assessment strategies – when recruitment has become more competitive, faster, more digitally dominated and more expensive, being able to deploy candidate assessment data effectively, at scale, has become a must-have tool in the recruiter tool belt.
The cult of hyper-personalisation.
Assessment tools can help build employer brands, set a high standard for technical framework gatekeeping and correctly infer who is the best fit for a job.
But to truly connect with a potential employee requires a connection beyond the brand – it requires the building of a perception of competence, competitiveness, positivity and personalised services in an employer by a candidate.
Agile, AI-powered tools are becoming key here, and sit at the forefront of creating a more personalised culture of recruitment. The foundation for this new, personalised era of recruitment lies in adapting to the strengths, drivers and motivations of each employee via a range of agile assessment tools.
From behavioural and cognitive testing and AI-powered job matching, to personality motivation benchmarking, image-based personality assessments and more, forward-thinking recruiters understand that “personalisation” has to be more than a slogan – every candidate touchpoint has to be powered by it, and every candidate has to know why and how their information is used to power not only their application to a job, but their whole career.
This is what assessment tools can give if leveraged in the right way. And at IHR Bristol it was the hot topic!
A quick, responsive process is what you need to attract and engage the best talent.
At Rectec we help organisations to find the best Applicant Tracking System or best Recruitment CRM to suit your needs, accompanied by our unique complementary technology marketplace, to help you build the perfect recruitment tech stack for your business.