3 Innovative Approaches to Assessing Candidate Fit

In today’s job market, HR professionals know that locating the perfect candidate goes way beyond evaluating qualifications on paper.

The traditional ways of doing things–a resume, a round of interviews, an offer—are still valuable. There’s nothing wrong with keeping your hiring process classic. But these steps may not always be the best way to comprehensively understand how well a candidate will click with a particular role, and how well they’ll fit in with your company’s unique culture. Therefore, innovative approaches to assessing candidates can be helpful for organizations that want to ensure they’ve made the right hire.

Candidates might be able to excel within the role, but what if they just don’t excel at interviews? And vice versa—what if a candidate is charismatic and a great conversationalist, but doesn’t have the skills or personality you’re looking for? Interviews might be able to capture skills like communication and presentability, but they have a more difficult time helping you understand how someone’s able to adapt when needed, or how well someone works on a team.

By utilizing innovative approaches to the interview process, companies can make more informed hiring decisions while also providing job candidates with an immersive recruitment experience, helping your business stand out from the competition. In doing so, you’re able to set yourself up for success, building a high-performing team and driving innovation long after the contact has been signed. So, if you’re looking to change up your hiring process, here are three innovative approaches for assessing a candidate.

Job Auditions

Rather than choosing to rely on an interview alone, more and more companies are inviting candidates to participate in job auditions. These can look like anything from role-playing to truly putting someone in the job for a set period to observe how they do. This approach allows companies to assess the candidate’s actual skills in action, which will provide a more accurate representation of just how well they’d perform in the role.

Job auditions allow candidates to demonstrate their expertise by completing tasks relevant to their potential role. Whether it’s writing a press release, designing a mock-up logo, or presenting an effective sales pitch, job auditions provide you with tangible evidence of a candidate’s skills. Why ask how someone would do something when you could instead observe how well they actually do it? By observing candidates in a simulated work experience, recruiters or HR professionals can see just how well candidates perform under pressure, work with other team members, and handle common challenges. A realistic preview of the role enables management to then make hiring decisions, reducing the risk of a hiring misfire. Just because a candidate gives an excellent interview doesn’t mean that when they’re in the deep end, they’ll be able to succeed. Of course, the same can be said for a job audition, but it’s at least more realistic than a simple interview process.

Culture Interviews

A culture interview is different than a regular interview: instead of assessing a candidate’s abilities, you’re assessing how well they would fit within your company’s unique values and culture. It’s a part of the recruiting process that helps you assess the candidates through the lens of culture, not just the lens of degrees and certifications. By utilizing culture interviews, you’ll make sure that someone is either a culture fit (whether or not someone will click well in your company culture) or a culture add (someone who can bring something new to the table and ensure diversity within your business). It’s important to note that you aren’t just looking for someone who’s like everyone else—if everyone on your team is outgoing, it may really benefit you to bring in more of an introvert. You want to balance out the cultural feel while still staying true to your values.

By asking behavioral questions that get to the heart of a candidate’s past work experience and how they’ve reacted to specific situations, you’ll be able to gain important insights into how candidates are likely to behave at your workplace. This increased transparency will contribute to both a positive candidate experience and, hopefully, a long-term working relationship. You don’t want to bring someone onto your team who checks all the right boxes but will be unpleasantly surprised at how your team does things. Remember, when assessing new hires, you’re also hoping to invest in them long-term to reduce turnover and enhance retention. The last thing you want is to be doing all of this again in few months because you couldn’t properly vet whether or not your company was a good fit for this particular candidate.

Gamified Assessments

When most people think of a behavioral assessment, they picture those weird questions like, “if you were a kitchen tool, which would you be?” But gamified assessments aren’t that out-of-the-box. They’re simply a way to keep interviews from being tedious, injecting interactivity to an otherwise dull process to bring out a candidate’s true skillset. Gamified assessments utilize challenges like puzzles, games, or simulations in order to pull out a candidate’s cognitive abilities and problem-solving skills. For example, a candidate might be tasked with arranging a series of shapes to form a specific pattern or picture within a given time limit or navigating a virtual maze.

Why are gamified assessments so useful? The answer is twofold. First, they help you uncover more of a candidate’s “soft skills” (problem solving, ability to stay calm under pressure, etc.) that aren’t always incredibly apparent in the interview setting. Second, they can help show a candidate’s personality. Companies are increasingly seeking candidates that aren’t just able to handle the tasks set in front of them but are also good cultural fits for a business. If a candidate is getting nervous or annoyed at being asked to partake in a gamified assessment, it says something about their personality and how well they’d fit in within your company.

Claire Swinarski is a Contributing Editor at HR Daily Advisor.

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