A business is only as strong as the people running it. Employers with an eye for talent will hire the best individual for a specific role, and when you have a team of people with their expertise, it’s like a well-oiled engine. A team is vital to the success of the business. But how does one find the best people for the job? This article will tackle skills assessments and how they can help you build a team of competent workers.
Identify Technical And Soft Skills
When skills assessments are ongoing, it’s crucial to test applicants’ technical and soft skills. These skills are needed in the workplace. A technician, for example, will know how to repair specific equipment they specialize in, but they might have difficulty expressing troubleshooting concerns to their clients.
Technical skills correlate to their profession, and soft skills help them communicate and collaborate with coworkers and superiors. To test both skills, simulations are often one of the most effective tools as it enables applicants a chance to interact with a programmed environment. For those working in the IT sector, you can assess their skills if they have the necessary skill and knowledge on any of the following depending on their roles and responsibilities:
- Programming
- Coding
- Security
- Troubleshooting
- DevOps
- Cloud-computer
- …and more
You may prepare a technical interview to see how your applicant will handle tasks they are unsure of, the types of coded language they’ve used, what their most challenging projects were, and how they overcame the problem. Other types of assessment might also include behavioral testing, work habits, education, and technical tools and software. The interview also aims to test the communication prowess of your IT personnel and how well they can communicate issues and solutions.
Look For Comprehension And Decision-Making Skills
If your company constantly deals with customers, their first point of contact is the customer service representatives. It’s their task to answer questions, assess concerns, and provide answers and solutions to various customer issues. The skills needed to provide good customer service will vary depending on their job description. Still, they must be able to comprehend the customer’s concerns and know what best to do about a particular situation.
You can ask them a series of questions when looking for the skills mentioned. It’s up to you what you’d deem correct as long as the applicants can make a logical defense of their answers. When looking into the decision-making skills of an individual, you might want to use the following criteria:
- Allowing a request to maintain a positive brand reputation
- Granting an appeal with the hope that a customer will purchase a product or service
- Refusal of a request because it’d be against the company policy
To assess comprehension skills, you can ask questions about the company product and how customers can benefit from them in specific situations. The applicant must have knowledge of the products or services the company offers to provide the best answers for the customer. They might even give links to sources from your company website for additional solutions.
Personalize Your Skills Assessment
One thing HR managers should never do is provide a one-size-fits-all assessment test. In reality, each team member and applicant should be given a customized assessment depending on their needs, position, and preferences in the workplace. Departments should have their skills assessments to get to know each team member.
Personalized skills enable you to test for skillsets closely related to the employee’s work performance instead of targeting irrelevant skills. A salesperson doesn’t need to know how to compute expenses, just as an IT personnel doesn’t need to know how to fix hardware.
If your company is giving an online or on-site training program, having individualized assessment enhances its value because it enables employees to understand the subject matter and learn how essential skills analysis is. If they’re given the same tests as everyone else, they might start to question if the method will help them improve their performance and be a step closer to their career goals.
Look At The Character And Competency
There are times when business success comes from the potential and character of the individuals you choose to hire into your company. Temperament is innate in a person and it’s difficult to train or change a personality. But an individual will learn trainable skills and accept to be versatile to accomplish anything. Look for insight, motivation, engagement, and determination – qualities that a team manager should have.
The most effective managers focus on serving their team instead of managing. It may sound counter-intuitive, but a manager must have the best interests of individual members of the group. Effective management is about striving to be genuinely supportive of personal and team-related goals.
When assessing the skills of a team manager, there are five areas of consideration you should consider. It’ll let you know how much they understand their responsibilities.
- Communication
- Planning
- Continuous Improvement
- Supervision
- Execution
In Conclusion
Skills assessment tests allow employers to search and find capable employees and applicants who best fit specific roles and responsibilities.
By giving them personalized tests, you can target the ones who will grow into their company roles. You might also need to look into their character because their attitude and behavior will support their skills and help your company’s reputation flourish.
