Tips for Creating Online Exams for Job Applicants
Often what is happening in the business world is reflected in the schools and vise-versa. The idea of online exams has been around for awhile, but with more and more state departments of education turning to this effective means of assessing students, businesses seem to be turning to this method to recruit the best potential candidates to their workforce as well.
Especially when you need to recruit outsourced or online workers who work at home, it is important that you weed out those who don't quite fit the bill by having a way to assess what their skills are.
But how can you maximize the potential of this for your business? HR recruiting specialists need to know how to channel this platform and use it to the best of their ability to maximize the results. And how do you create the best assessments to make sure you are focusing in on the most important aspects of the business? If you are a HR specialist, here are a few ways to ensure that you get the most out of the online testing platform to achieve the best results in the hiring process:
- Focus on skills first. Design the test so that it will focus in on the most important skills needed to do the job. You need to find out the knowledge base and experience of the applicants so you can filter the best candidates from those who you know won't work out.
- Include personality traits. One of the most important factors in hiring is certain personality traits that go with the job. You don't want to hire a socially shy person to do sales, for instance. Including personality traits in the test you create will help find the best candidates according to their unique personality traits.
- Ask some simple questions. Not all questions should be overly difficult. This many discourage some applicants. So, unless you are a medical institution where the questions determine the competency, don't make them too difficult. Follow the standard of most educators. They should be just challenging enough to make someone think, but easy enough to be answered in a reasonable amount of time.
- Ask some abstract questions. Fashion the test to include some thought questions, such as, "If you were in a dessert with no water, what would you do to survive," etc. These questions often give you extra insight as to the thinking processes of possible candidates and help you decide who makes the final cut.
- Keep it reasonably short. Tests with too long of a time frame to finish often get abandoned. Even if someone is interested in a job, creating exceptionally long tests may be discouraging to the user. Keep it reasonably short, with only the most important questions in the exam.
Creating online exams for your business applicants to take is one of the most important steps in ensuring you attract and get good potential candidates for the job. With a little extra time devoted to the process, you can create the best questions that will focus on the most important aspects of the business and cut your HR recruiting time in half.
If you would like more information on how to maximize your time as an HR recruiting specialist, contact us. We are the experts in online exams for human resources departments.