To hire the best candidate for the job, you need to do your due diligence. More than that, you need to have a reliable and thorough candidate assessment process that allows you to screen inbound applicants quickly, fairly, and effectively.
This article will explore the importance of candidate assessments, and share some specific tools and techniques you can use to create your own process.
What is candidate assessment?
Candidate assessment is the process employers use to evaluate job applicants’ skills, qualifications, and suitability for a role.
This process may include interviews, skills tests, personality assessments, cognitive ability tests, work samples, background checks, and situational judgment exercises. The specific methods and tools vary based on the company’s needs and the job’s requirements.
By using candidate assessments, employers can make data-driven hiring decisions, predict job performance, improve the quality of hires, and ensure alignment with company culture. These assessments also streamline the recruitment process by efficiently managing large applicant pools, reducing time-to-hire, and minimizing bias.
Modern candidate assessments are often integrated with Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) to enhance fairness, consistency, and accessibility to assessment outcomes for all hiring team members. When implemented effectively, candidate assessments help organizations build diverse, high-performing teams and foster long-term retention by ensuring the right talent is hired for the right roles.
The benefits of candidate assessments
Candidate assessments are designed to streamline the hiring process, improve decision-making, and ensure the best fit between candidates and roles by probing and testing each candidate’s competency and fit for the role in question.
The primary benefits of candidate assessments include:
- Identifying top talent efficiently. Candidate assessments allow employers to filter large applicant pools quickly, focusing on those with the skills, qualifications, and potential required for the role.
- Predicting job performance. By evaluating specific skills, cognitive abilities, or personality traits, assessments provide insights into how candidates are likely to perform in the role.
- Enhancing cultural fit. Tools like personality and situational judgment tests help determine if candidates align with the company’s values, culture, and team dynamics, improving collaboration and retention.
- Reducing unconscious bias. Structured assessments ensure candidates are evaluated consistently and fairly, minimizing subjective judgments.
- Supporting data-driven decisions. Assessment results provide measurable data that hiring managers can use to compare candidates objectively and justify their decisions.
- Improving hiring efficiency. Automating evaluations reduces time-to-hire, helping companies secure top talent quickly, even in competitive markets.
- Enhancing the candidate experience. Well-structured assessments create a clear and professional hiring process, leaving candidates with a positive impression of the organization.
Employers can leverage candidate assessments to streamline recruitment, build stronger teams, and achieve long-term success by aligning talent with organizational goals.
10 common types of candidate assessment
Candidate assessment techniques come in many forms and can be deployed at various stages of the hiring process. Below, we’ve compiled a list of the most common types of candidate assessments, with an explanation of when to use them in your hiring workflow.
1. Job posting and applications
Candidate assessment starts when you identify a hiring need at your organization. This is the planning stage where you clearly identify what you do and do not want in an applicant.
At this stage, the recruiter and hiring manager will meet to create an ideal candidate persona.
They’ll establish:
- Required hard and soft skills
- Specific competencies
- Required experience and education
- Nice-to-haves
This candidate persona will be used to create the job requirements document, which is the basis against which the hiring team will screen and assess candidates going forward. Once this has been established, the recruiter and hiring manager can move on to writing a concrete job description.
From there, attention turns to advertising the role and taking in new applicants.
This will include:
- Creating a tailored application form that pre-screens applicants for minimum requirements
- Writing and deploying recruitment ads to targeted job boards with messaging that appeals to the target candidate persona
- Outreach across other recruitment marketing channels, such as social media, 1:1 outreach, talent pipeline engagement, and more
The goal in this phase is to help candidates pre-screen themselves by clearly stating the job requirements, showcasing your company and culture, and targeting your ideal personas. If a candidate assesses that they are qualified for the position, then it’s your turn to make your own assessment.
Tip:
Recruitee by Tellent allows you to create custom application forms that are tailored for each job. This allows you to include questions that screen for the specific requirements you’ve outlined, ensuring that you can “knock out” candidates early who do not meet the minimum for the job.
2. Applicant screening and shortlisting
Once your applicants have applied, the bulk of the candidate assessment work begins. This phase is a combination of automated and manual screening that leverages your recruitment expertise and tech stack to shortlist promising applications.
This phase typically includes:
- Automated parsing of resumes and cover letters by your ATS.
- Social media scraping for additional information or red flags.
- Automated shortlisting based on the above information.
- Telephone or video pre-screen interviews for further information on experience and personality.
- In-person interviews with the recruiter, hiring manager, or team members. This can take the form of:
- Structured interviews.
- Collaborative interviews.
- One-on-one interviews with staff and management.
The candidate screening phase will vary depending on the resources and technology available to you. It should also be closely tailored to the responsibilities, seniority, and complexity of the job title. For example, junior applicants should receive a different level of screening than C-suite candidates, and creative types will be asked different questions than engineers.
Tip: Recruitee by Tellent lets you create hiring teams for each role. You can invite stakeholders from across the organization to a centralized job portal in which they can review candidate profiles, share their opinions and insights, and collectively come to an agreement about next steps for each applicant.
3. Skills tests
Skills tests are one of the most effective ways to assess a candidate's ability to perform the tasks required for a specific role. These assessments provide a practical, hands-on way to measure both hard and soft skills, ensuring that applicants meet the technical and professional demands of the position.
At this stage, skills tests typically include:
- Technical assessments. Tests designed to evaluate role-specific knowledge, such as coding challenges for software developers, writing assignments for content creators, or design projects for graphic designers.
- General aptitude tests. Assessments that measure logical reasoning, problem-solving abilities, and other cognitive skills that may apply broadly across roles.
- Soft skills evaluations. Scenarios or exercises that assess skills like communication, time management, or teamwork.
Skills tests can be deployed at different points in the hiring process. For entry-level positions, these tests may be used early on to narrow the candidate pool. For more senior roles, they are often used after initial interviews to further evaluate top contenders.
The goal of skills tests is to ensure candidates not only meet the job's requirements but can also deliver on their resumes' promises. Importantly, these assessments should be tailored to the role to provide meaningful insights and avoid unnecessary complexity for candidates.
4. Cognitive ability tests
Cognitive ability tests are designed to measure a candidate’s thinking, problem-solving, and learning capabilities. These tests assess mental agility, logical reasoning, memory, and attention to detail, making them excellent predictors of future job performance across a variety of roles.
Common types of cognitive ability tests include:
- Logical reasoning tests. Measure a candidate’s capacity to draw conclusions and solve problems based on given information.
- Numerical reasoning tests. Evaluate mathematical abilities and the capacity to interpret data from charts or tables.
- Verbal reasoning tests. Assess comprehension and critical thinking in interpreting written material.
- Abstract reasoning tests. Gauge the ability to identify patterns and relationships between ideas or objects.
Cognitive tests are often deployed early in the hiring process to narrow down a large pool of candidates. For technical or analytical roles, these assessments are particularly useful in identifying top contenders who can excel in high-pressure or complex environments.
The results of cognitive ability tests provide valuable insights into a candidate’s potential to learn new skills, adapt to challenges, and thrive in the workplace. However, they should be used in combination with other assessments, as they don’t account for emotional intelligence, creativity, or interpersonal skills.
5. Personality tests
Personality tests are designed to assess a candidate's traits, preferences, and behavioral tendencies. They help employers evaluate how well a candidate’s personality aligns with the company culture, team dynamics, and role requirements.
While not a direct measure of skill or performance, personality tests provide critical insights into how a candidate might function within an organization.
Common types of personality assessments include:
- Big Five personality tests. Measure traits like openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and emotional stability.
- Workplace personality assessments. Focus on traits related to productivity, collaboration, and leadership potential.
- Motivational tests. Explore what drives a candidate, such as achievement, recognition, or creativity.
These assessments are especially useful for roles requiring strong interpersonal skills, leadership, or teamwork. For example, personality tests can help identify candidates who are naturally collaborative for team-oriented roles or those with high emotional resilience for customer-facing positions.
Personality tests are often administered in the later stages of the hiring process after a candidate has passed technical or cognitive evaluations. They add depth to the assessment by highlighting how a candidate’s personal attributes complement their professional qualifications.
6. Situational judgment tests
Situational judgment tests evaluate a candidate’s decision-making abilities and problem-solving skills by presenting them with hypothetical workplace scenarios.
They’re particularly valuable for understanding how candidates might react under pressure, resolve conflicts, or navigate complex situations.
In a situational judgment test (SJT), candidates are typically given a scenario relevant to the role and asked to choose the best course of action from multiple options. These scenarios might include:
- Conflict resolution. Managing a disagreement with a coworker or handling a difficult customer.
- Time management. Prioritizing tasks during a tight deadline.
- Ethical decision-making. Responding to a situation that tests professional integrity.
Situational and judgment tests are highly predictive of on-the-job performance, especially in roles requiring leadership, customer service, or quick thinking. They allow employers to assess soft skills such as adaptability, communication, and problem-solving in a practical context.
In these tests, an interviewer might present a conflict resolution scenario to a candidate and ask them to talk through how they would resolve the issue. For example, the scenario might involve two department heads who disagree over resource allocation, impacting team morale.
The candidate is asked to select the best course of action from options like mediating a discussion, making an independent decision, or delegating the task. This helps evaluate their leadership, decision-making, and conflict-resolution skills.
These tests can be administered at any stage of the hiring process, though they are often used in later phases to evaluate top candidates. The results provide a clear picture of how candidates are likely to handle real-world challenges.
7. Work samples and simulations
Work samples and simulations are practical assessments that evaluate a candidate’s ability to perform tasks directly related to the job. By recreating real-world scenarios or asking candidates to complete job-specific assignments, these assessments provide insight into their skills, problem-solving approach, and overall readiness for the role.
Examples of work samples and simulations include:
- Presentations. Preparing and delivering a mock proposal for a marketing role.
- Technical assignments. Writing code or fixing bugs for a software development role.
- Role-playing exercises. Simulating a customer service interaction or sales pitch.
These assessments are particularly useful for roles requiring specific technical skills, creativity, or hands-on expertise. They help employers move beyond resumes and interviews by providing tangible evidence of a candidate’s ability to perform.
Here’s an example. For a sales manager position, a candidate might be asked to participate in a simulation where they lead a team meeting to develop a sales strategy for a new product. The hiring team would evaluate their ability to communicate clearly, motivate team members, and create actionable strategies that align with company goals.
While work samples and simulations are a great way to assess on-the-job competency and collaboration abilities, it’s important not to go too far with them. You should never ask candidates to perform extensive amounts of work for free. Keep these assessments short and highly relevant. If you ask candidates to perform a significant amount of work, be sure to pay them a fair rate for their time.
8. Behavioral assessments
Behavioral assessments evaluate a candidate’s past actions, tendencies, and responses to determine how they might behave in future workplace situations.
These assessments are based on the principle that past behavior is a strong predictor of future performance, making them a valuable tool for assessing traits like leadership, teamwork, and resilience.
Common behavioral assessments include:
- Questionnaires. Candidates answer questions about how they handled past situations or hypothetical scenarios.
- Structured interviews. Recruiters ask candidates to describe past experiences and their approach to resolving challenges.
- Behavioral traits tests. These identify tendencies like adaptability, initiative, and interpersonal skills.
Behavioral assessments are especially useful for roles that require strong emotional intelligence, collaboration, or problem-solving skills. By focusing on how candidates have handled real-world challenges, employers can gain deeper insights into their character, work ethic, and ability to align with organizational values.
These assessments are typically used in the mid-to-late stages of the hiring process to differentiate between top candidates. They complement technical and cognitive evaluations, offering a more holistic view of a candidate’s potential.
9. Background checks
Once you’ve put your candidates through all the required assessments, you’ll likely have a good idea of which applicant you’d like to hire. If there is a clear frontrunner (or frontrunners), then the next phase is to confirm that what they’ve told you about their background and experience is accurate.
The background checks you use will vary depending on company policy, regulations, security protocol, or any other requirement that needs to be met before a formal job offer can be made.
Here are some examples of background checks you can consider:
- Reference checks.
- Criminal record checks.
- Security clearance checks.
- Resume cross-referencing.
- Verification of education credentials.
- Verification of prior work experience and performance.
If you’re unsure which background checks to use, consult your legal or human resources department for a list of requirements.
Tip: Recruitee by Tellent integrates with leading background check providers like SpringVerify, Refapp, Checkr, and Verified First, allowing you to deploy and manage background checks from a single platform.
10. Legal and eligibility checks
Lastly, many companies and countries have strict eligibility and legal requirements that need to be met before a job offer can be sent to an applicant. Make sure that you’re aware of these policies, and inform your candidates of these requirements early in the application process.
These might include VISA applications or eligibility to work in a specific country, alcohol or drug tests, credit checks, or any other policy that might prohibit the candidate from working for your company.
Common pitfalls to avoid when assessing candidates
Candidate assessments can greatly improve hiring outcomes, but they need to be used thoughtfully to avoid negative outcomes. Missteps in the assessment process can lead to candidate drop off due to overly complex and onerous application processes, poor hiring decisions due to overreliance on assessments and tests, and ultimately a negative candidate experience that can impact your employer brand.
Here are some key pitfalls to avoid when assessing candidates:
- Relying solely on candidate assessments. While assessments provide valuable insights about candidates, they should not be the only factor in hiring decisions. Combining assessment results with interviews, references, and recruiter judgment ensures a more holistic evaluation of the candidate.
- Overloading candidates with tests. Requiring excessive or redundant assessments can cause candidate fatigue and deter top talent from completing the application process. Use only the assessments most relevant to the role and keep them concise.
- Failing to customize assessments for the role. Generic tests may not accurately measure the skills or qualities required for specific positions. Tailoring assessments to the job ensures they provide meaningful insights and align with the organization’s needs.
- Neglecting cultural and organizational fit. Skills and knowledge are important, but overlooking cultural alignment can lead to poor retention and team friction. Include assessments that evaluate values, interpersonal skills, and alignment with company culture.
- Ignoring inclusivity in assessment design. Assessments that lack accessibility features or use biased language can unintentionally exclude or disadvantage certain candidates. Ensure your assessments are fair, inclusive, and compliant with diversity and equity standards.
- Focusing only on hard skills. While technical skills are critical, soft skills such as communication, adaptability, and emotional intelligence are equally important. Balance your assessments to evaluate both.
- Misinterpreting or overvaluing results. Assessment scores provide a snapshot but don’t account for a candidate’s potential for growth. Avoid rejecting promising candidates solely based on rigid scoring thresholds.
- Failing to integrate assessments with the broader hiring process. If assessments are treated as a standalone activity, their results may not align with interviews or other evaluation methods. Ensure that assessment insights inform the entire hiring process.
- Providing poor candidate communication. Candidates should know what to expect, why they are being assessed, and how the results will be used. Lack of transparency can lead to frustration and disengagement.
Avoiding these pitfalls ensures a more efficient, fair, and effective assessment process that enhances both hiring outcomes and the candidate experience.
Perfect your candidate assessment process with Recruitee
Candidate assessment is perhaps the most important component of effective hiring. Make sure that you have a clear process in place that can be adapted to meet the requirements of each individual job requisition while maintaining quality and efficiency.
Recruitee by Tellent offers tools and features at all stages of the assessment process to help you align your hiring team, record interactions with candidates, and come to a consensus about the best person for the job.
