You often need to gather additional information about each candidate’s skills, knowledge and abilities to decide on their suitability for the job.
Successful hiring uses a combination of assessment methods improves the validity of decisions.
After completing this section, you will have:
- options to assess candidates against job requirements.
Actions
- Design the assessment process so each stage screens out unsuitable or less competitive candidates. Test key skills early and reserve time consuming or costly assessments until later stages when there are fewer candidates.
- Reflect where possible your assessment activities to resemble and link the work to be done in the job as this is the best way for candidates to demonstrate their ability to do the job. It also provides a realistic snapshot of the work they are to do if successful.
- Incorporate a number of assessment methods to add more information for decision making. This allows assessors to make a balanced judgement of each candidate even if they don’t perform well in one aspect of the assessment process.
- Advise candidates they can contact you to discuss reasonable adjustments that might be required, and screen them in an inclusive way to encourage greater diversity. Ensure the process does not exclude participation from any candidate, being mindful of your agency’s diversity goals and values. For example, over-reliance on “years of experience” could exclude younger people from being assessed positively.
Resources
- Options for assessing candidates
- Impact of assessment methods
- Candidate assessment template
- Guide for developing interview questions
- Qualities of a successful interviewer
- Assessing candidates using digital technologies
