Benchmarking allows you to conduct a skill comparison among the employees within your company, identify trends and provide your recruitment team with a benchmark (average) skill level that future employees would need to meet.
By using the Skillsarena testing process to assess applicants, you can objectively measure and select new recruits based on their suitability and skills for the role.
Benchmarking is an exercise to ensure that when you recruit in the future, the assessments you choose and your expected ‘pass mark’ are realistically aligned to the skills of your employees who are already successful in the role.
In this way, benchmarking is a fantastic tool for improving your recruitment strategy and staying ahead of your industry competitors.
As an example, we often hear our clients say that they would like people to have a content writing ability of X number of words per minute (WPM). On paper, this sounds great, but it may not be an actual representation of those who are already successful in the organisation.
A way to improve this would be to identify the WPM count of the company's most successful employees and use that as the skill benchmark when recruiting the next employee.
You select a number of great performers to take the skills test and then take their average score as the benchmark for passing the test for future candidates.
Identify the skills you want to measure and recruit for in the future.
Select and engage the successful team members whose skill levels you want to clone. This will likely involve management analysing their peers' work to determine the top performers within the company.
Measure and review the group's results against the expectations and needs of your company. By analysing trends in their performance, productivity, output and efficiency, your company is provided with insightful metrics about what skills and strengths make a high-quality, top-performing individual in a particular role.
After completing your metric analysis and conducting a comparison of your team's proficiency, use the average score from your top-performing team members as the benchmark for your future hires.
How do you know what skills and skill levels you are looking for if you don’t have a comparison of these from your company's top performers? Benchmarking your current employees is the answer!
You can ensure that the assessments you choose contain a pass mark and selection criteria that are beneficial to, and realistic for, the success of your future hires. Selecting the right candidates to interview is crucial to your recruitment process. By using the Skillsarena testing process to assess candidates, you can objectively measure and select new hires based on their suitability and skills, and keep your company performing well against industry competitors.
When hiring a new team member, you need to make sure that they can keep up with their colleagues. By tailoring your selection criteria and pre-employment assessments to the average skill and performance levels of your company's top-performing talent, benchmarking ensures that you maintain and enhance your organisation's skillset.
Having a benchmark in place that ensures best-practice skill levels in your future recruits is an easy and effective way to enhance your recruitment strategy - regardless of your industry or how small/large your business is. Not only does benchmarking make it that much easier to make management decisions about who to hire and who to cut from your talent pool, but it also ensures that there are no drastic skills gaps or performance gaps between your existing employees and new recruits.
When your team has the best skills, it leads to superior performance and drives improvements in your company's productivity and growth.
Having a skills benchmark in place when recruiting benefits your competitive edge for all the above reasons. Regardless of your industry, the business world is highly competitive, so it's absolutely essential for the growth and success of your organisation to stay ahead of the game. Using a skills benchmark allows you to become a key competitor in the market.
Situational Judgement Tests are engaging psychometric tests, they allow candidates to learn more about the requirements of the position for which they are applying.
Measure a candidate’s values, attitude, and approach to everyday tasks and scenarios to understand how they will perform if they successfully interview and join your organisation.
A Situational Judgement Test—otherwise known as an SJT or Situational Strengths Test—is a kind of psychometric test that measures the skills and behaviours of prospective employees, such as their soft skills, common sense, non-academic behaviours and practical intelligence.
SJTs produce this information by presenting individuals with a variety of different work-related situations which they may experience when performing the functions of the job for which they are applying. For each situation put forward, a respondent will need to select one of the four answer options available, basing their answer on which they believe to be the most effective course of action to take if they were faced with the situation in a professional setting. This type of reasoning test always uses multiple-choice questions – individuals are unable to submit personalised responses.
When assessing SJTs, employers will be looking for correct answers, as undoubtedly, they will have a preferred course of action in mind. However, irrespective of a test-taker’s choice, the ability to see which course of action a prospective employee would take in a situation of your choosing will offer unique insight into their decision-making processes, competencies and personality traits. Additionally, you will learn more about their values and behaviours when faced with a work-based task.
Off-the-shelf SJTs can be an effective general practice for employers. However, to gain maximum value, we can create bespoke Situational Judgement Tests to the specifications of your organisation and its unique challenges. By working closely with you, we create SJT questions custom-built to the characteristics, values and culture of your company.
Not only will Situational Judgement Tests prove to be incredibly valuable to your organisation, but they are also extremely cost-effective and the process of their creation is highly efficient and painless.
A Skillsarena consultant will learn about your company culture, the scenarios you would like to assess and the roles that you are recruiting for.
Based on our findings from the discover stage, our consultant will draft scenarios and example questions for you and your team to review.
After your team has reviewed the content, we will take any tweaks and suggestions on board and make any adjustments required.
A practice test will be completed on multiple members of your current team to ensure that the content aligns with your organisation’s mission.
By using real-life work scenarios, Situational Judgement Tests offer both an applicant and employer a chance to understand how the individual will operate when faced with the situation in a professional setting. In this way, Situational Judgements Tests are extremely beneficial for individuals on both sides of the recruitment process.
Situational judgement tests are a perfect way to assess a potential employee’s core competencies in relation to the role which they will be performing. By placing them in simulated situations based on what they may experience at work, employers are offered a unique insight into a potential employee’s job-related judgment calls, cognitive ability and problem-solving abilities.
As well as being very cost-effective, well-designed and convenient to deploy, SJTs allow employers to save time and resources by easily prioritising the top talent from a large pool of applicants.
Additionally, this test-taking can form part of a standardised recruitment process if the role is regularly open. This can be especially effective when hiring for positions for which candidates are likely to have little to no work experience, such as entry-level positions or graduate schemes.
Taking ability tests, aptitude tests, or any other kind of situational judgement test as an applicant can be hugely beneficial both for serving as a window into the inner workings of an organisation and for the candidate’s personal development.
When an SJT has been created to bespoke specifications, it will undoubtedly reflect an organisation’s company culture, values and ethics, offering candidates a high-level indication of what it would be like to work in that environment. As candidates will receive a realistic job preview, employee retention is much more likely.
Additionally, as SJTs are engaging psychometric tests, they allow candidates to learn more about the requirements of the position for which they are applying.
Results from bespoke assessments will be far more applicable and useful in your recruitment process and are more likely to produce hires of a higher quality.
Offer a realistic insight into all aspects of the job and organisation to set expectations, positively impact the candidate experience, and ensure that every new hire will be a professional and cultural fit.
RJPs serve as a powerful self-deselection sifting tool, as any job applicants who do not feel aligned with the depiction of the job being put across will be able to opt-out of interviewing with the company.
A Realistic Job Preview (RJP) is a highly effective recruiting tool that employers use to present an unfiltered snapshot of the job they are hiring for. RJPs illustrate numerous details related to the job, including duties, expectations, work environment, and the organisation as a whole, in a negative and positive light, allowing potential employees to decide for themselves whether the role, as described, is the right choice for them.
RJPs offer candidates a thorough depiction of what a ‘day in the life’ would look like in a particular role, or as part of the wider organisation.
Realistic Job Previews separate prospective applicants aligned with your mission statement and organisational values from those job seekers who do not share the same passion, who withdraw from the process after witnessing the more realistic expectations and job description – a staggering 45% on average! In other words, by using an RJP, you will be sure that 100% of your applicants will want your job, not just any job.
Hosted on your website, the Realistic Job Preview will be accessible by an unlimited amount of applicants, all of whom will receive suitability feedback based on their answers.
So often during recruitment, organisations are misleading with job descriptions, portraying an unrealistic image of the role and wider culture of the organisation, whether intentional or not. However, any applicant hoping to join the company is keen to learn how both a good and bad day on the job will look.
To create a Realistic Job Preview that will benefit both your organisation and your applicants— one that offers a realistic representation of your workplace, day-to-day employee experience and job description—a Skillsarena consultant will take the time to understand the role in detail, the scenarios an employee may face, your company culture and retention dynamics.
After gleaning information about your organisation through research, discovery conversations with current employees and more, we will design the image of the job that you will present to potential new employees. We will do this by collating video, audio, and text files and delivering these in a way that reflects your organisation’s values and culture.
After we have created a well-designed plan of action that takes into account all aspects of the job role and organisation (the negative information as well as the positive), our team will work together with you to bring your Realistic Job Preview and to life.
Once the content we will include in your Realistic Job Preview has been thoroughly verified and approved, we provide the RJP to you in all file formats necessary. This way, potential employees can view and benefit from your Realistic Job Preview immediately, either by accessing it on your website or on the job listing sites you are using for recruitment. Alternatively, your content can be hosted by us.
If you want to be as truthful as possible with prospective employees and to promote an image of the company that is as close to reality as can be, realistic job previews are the best option.
Any job role is likely to receive a huge amount of applications that can be incredibly difficult and time-consuming to assess. RJPs will allow you to dedicate more time and resources to genuine, qualified applicants, as on average, 45% of applicants withdraw from a job application process after completing an RJP. This powerful de-selection tool requires zero administration overhead from you or your team.
Additionally, if a candidate deselects after not liking what they have seen in the Realistic Job Preview, they will not be alienated as customers. As they will have realised that working for the organisation is not right for them as opposed to the organisation itself, no negative feeling will be left.
Employee turnover is a big problem for so many businesses. As the onboarding and eventual dismissal of a bad hire can be extremely costly to a business, making sure that every you recruit into your organisation is the right fit is extremely important. This turnover of staff is not only detrimental to finances, but to morale also. Employees are less likely to be engaged and your team spirit is likely to take a hit when your organisation is gaining and losing members on a regular basis.
If you want to recruit quality, high-performing staff and ensure that they stay a part of your organisation for longer, it is important to be more transparent with your prospective employees from the very beginning. Using a RJP may reduce the amount of applications you receive for a role, but it guarantees that those who do apply will not just be qualified for the role, but they are likely to fit into your existing culture with ease.
No matter what type of organisation you are, offering a job preview that is authentic comes with a huge amount of benefits, so much so that we advise including them as a standard part of any recruitment process.