Are you ready to bust another assessment myth? We are focusing on myth number two from our previous webinar ‘Busting the Myths of Talent Assessment’. If you missed the webinar and want to learn more click here to register and review.
MYTH: Candidates react negatively to assessments
There is a perception that assessments hurt the candidate experience. There are some valid considerations there – of course candidate experience matters.
- It is indeed the case that candidates will infer what it’s like to work for your company based on the candidate experience
- And it is quite likely that if you’re in a service industry, your candidates are potential customers, so you don’t want to turn them off with a bad experience
TRUTH: Candidate experience is elevated with assessments
One thing we’re able to do at Talent Science is offer for candidates to complete a survey about their experience right after they finish the assessment, and we do that periodically. Earlier this year, we opened up a couple of surveys and had a little over 5,000 candidates respond to them. These were candidates to a variety of different roles across a number of industries, but the majority would have been candidates for hourly jobs. Of that group:
- 93% reported they thought the assessment was easy to complete
- 89% said it took a reasonable amount of time
- 95% said the assessment was a positive experience
We also asked the question, what is a reasonable amount of time for assessment?
In this cumulative graph, if someone indicated that 10 minutes was reasonable, we assumed they also would think 5 minutes is reasonable. The most common response was 10 minutes, which makes sense because the majority of survey participants had just completed a 10-minute assessment. Interestingly, we did look at the data for those who had completed 2 assessments totaling a little over 20 minutes, and the most common response for that group was – you guessed it – 20 minutes. So it seems that people will tend to say whatever amount of time they just spent is reasonable. Taken together, we think this is pretty strong evidence that candidates do not find assessments to be a negative experience.
Question or thoughts on this myth? Comment below or reach out to your CSM.
