27 Oct How Can You Get to the Best Grads Fast?

Think of a buffet where there are hundreds of choices on display. Some will taste delicious, some will only be okay, and a few are going to give you food poisoning. To make things even more difficult, pretend that there are a hundred other people at the buffet who are all trying to snag the best food as well. This sounds like the beginning of a bad night, but it’s the challenge that faces recruiter’s every day when they are trying to find and recruit the best graduates.

The best graduates are snapped up within a few weeks, and so the difficulty is in finding and hiring them before your competitors do. Unfortunately, this is easier said than done, because graduates have no work experience they are almost completely unproven and this compounds the already difficult task of hiring employees. There are tools to help alleviate this uncertainty, interviews and CV’s are the most common. Let’s look at some stats. A CV screening will predict about 8% of variation in an employee’s performance, not a great figure. An excellently designed interview on the other hand can predict up to 36% of performance, fine when you’re doing five or six interviews, but prohibitively costly when scaled to the number of graduates who are out there.

Competency based assessment is the science of looking at what makes good graduates tick. By looking at the wealth of employment data now available we can take a single candidate and predict their workplace potential with unsurpassed accuracy.

• It’s quick: Talent assessment is fast, because it’s entirely automated you could have potentially evaluated thousands of candidates in the time it took you to read this blog (even if you’re a fast reader). Unless your competitor’s HR department is big enough to fill a stadium, there is no way they can compete with that kind of speed.
• It can’t be cheated: A poor candidate can still interview well. Likewise, a workshop to get a CV looking amazing isn’t hard to find. For every safeguard to ensure reliable recruitment, a devious candidate has cheated their way around it. Personality and cognitive tests on the other hand go straight to the source, cognitive tests are hard to fake, and it quickly becomes obvious when a candidate is trying to come off well on a personality test (in fact, there are specific questions which detect a candidate who is less than genuine).
• It cuts down the candidate pool fast: 25% of the population in the first world now have degrees, and this number is only set to increase. Competency based assessment is able to reduce the applicant pool by up to 90% by screening out those who simply don’t have the capability to perform. And our own data has shown that the average saving from switching from a manual process to an automated one is 55%.

Put simply, competency based assessment is the only way in which graduate recruiters will be able to keep up with the increasingly massive flood of graduates which our universities are producing. Finding the best graduates isn’t easy, but it can be made easier. Visit our website today to find out how you can start hiring the best.