05 Oct Tearing Your Hair Out About Grad Season? Fret No More With Adaptive Testing

When it comes to graduate recruitment, your company/brand’s reputation is everything. And in large part, this reputation is developed through your graduates talking   to one another. If a candidate has an excellent recruitment experience, they’re far more likely to recommend your company to their friends – regardless of whether or not they got the job! Perhaps the best example of this is Google. Laszlo Block, Vice-President of People Operations at Google says ‘Today 80 percent of people who have been interviewed and rejected report that they would recommend that a friend apply to Google.’ With a statistic like that, it’s no surprise they’re one of the best-known companies in the world.

The data shows that psychometric testing is by far the best method available for finding candidates – and is up to five times more effective than a CV screening and eight times more effective than a reference check at predicting workplace performance. Unfortunately, it’s a challenge to personalise a standardized psychometric test to your employment brand. Sure, you can put your logo and company name at the top. But the majority of their assessment experience will be answering a set questionnaire. And in this digital era where people are used to interactivity, a static, standardised questionnaire just won’t be that engaging by comparison.

However, by allowing for a high degree of interactivity, the emerging technology of computerised adaptive testing is allowing the candidate experience to be better than ever before. In short, computerised adaptive testing (or CAT for short) adapts the questions it asks to match the candidate’s abilities. Instead of questions being a set list, they are dynamically pulled from a database to match the candidate’s ability level. It’s a simple solution to the difficult problem of making tests engaging.

Beyond just interactivity, here are three ways computerised adaptive testing makes assessment a better experience for candidates:

• It’s fairer to candidates: There’s nothing anyone hates more than a cheater. Fortunately, CAT is much harder to cheat than regular tests. Although psychometric testing is hard to cheat – candidates can’t magically make themselves more equipped to answer questions than they are. The reality is that test-takers could share the questions that appeared with their friends or online – especially if the assessment is administered over the internet. CAT avoids this problem beautifully, because questions are drawn from a database no two tests are alike – so the answers can’t be shared. There are always going to be those who try and game the system, but by implementing CAT, you can make their job a lot harder.
• Tests are shorter: Because CAT dynamically adapts questions to candidate’s ability, and removes the questions which are far too hard or far too easy, it is able to reach a conclusion about a candidate’s abilities much faster. The data shows that adaptive testing typically has at least 50% less questions than regular testing, and can reduce the number of questions by as much as 90%. Ultimately, by saving candidates time on your psychometric tests, you’ll leave them with a positive experience of your psychometric assessments. Especially when your competitor’s tests took twice as long.
• It’s less frustrating: Because CAT adapts the questions it asks to a candidate’s skill level, they are never going to find themselves being asked questions which are greatly outside their skill range. Whip-smart candidates will avoid the tedium of having to answer questions which they find trivially easy. Conversely, candidates on the lower end of ability will not be repeatedly frustrated by a multitude of questions which they simply cannot answer. A test well suited to candidate’s abilities means that they will never feel as if it was unfair or boring.

Today, all forward-thinking grad recruiters are looking for ways to improve the candidate experience. CAT is an easy-to-implement and effective way to do it. Talegent will soon be updating our PATH platform with adaptive testing, so you can make sure the top grads end up on your team. The best grads are snapped up fast – so make sure your testing is faster.