When you think of the word “assessment”, you’re probably not imagining something that candidates love.
Instead, you might picture something lengthy, dragging on for 30 minutes or more. The experience is forgettable at best and irritating at worst. It’s most definitely not suitable for frontline, high-volume roles where speed is everything and candidate attrition is a massive concern. And it probably has a limited audience, fit for only certain types of roles and skill sets.
And you wouldn’t be wrong — that was the reality of assessments for a long time.
But recent innovations in assessment design have changed the story, making them much faster, easier, and more engaging. A survey of HR professionals conducted by SHRM found that 56% of employers now report using an assessment to guide hiring decisions. With this evidence that data is now an important driver of decision-making in people operations, collecting assessment scores from candidates has become an effective way to boost an organization’s data strategy.
But how to choose what assessment approach makes the most sense for your hiring needs? You’ve seen one assessment, you’ve seen them all, right?
Not exactly.
Paradox’s Traitify assessment is the complete opposite of the “traditional” assessment that candidates hate. And what’s more, we built our assessment specifically with frontline candidates in mind: it’s faster, simpler, and easier to take than anything else in the market, which ultimately leads to less frustration, higher completion, and ultimately better hires.
How fast? On average it takes two minutes. How easy? It has a 98% completion rate. How much better? Well, we’ll get to that a bit later on, but the short answer is much (how about a 38% reduction in turnover?).
With this evidence that data is now an important driver of decision-making in people operations, collecting assessment scores from candidates has become an effective way to boost an organization’s data strategy.
Here are four ways the Traitify assessment differentiates itself (and stands alone) from traditional assessments that candidates have always hated.
1. Traitify assessments hold candidates’ interest.
Among legacy assessment products, there was a lot of room for improvement in the candidate experience. For years, an assessment in a job application represented a step that had to be tolerated, not enjoyed. Including an assessment for a given role required a highly motivated talent pool willing to invest considerable time and energy to land the role. As a result, assessments were really only suitable for job seekers in consideration for management positions or other skilled salaried roles.
But that led us to ask: Why not use the assessment for more than just assessment scores? Why can’t we create an assessment that actually engages candidates, or makes them more curious about the role, or gives them a takeaway they can benefit from, thereby boosting the employment brand?
Of course, the answer we came up with was “we should and we can.” So we built it.
Traitify assessments provide an unrivaled candidate experience. They’re visually interesting, move quickly from item to item, and are easy for candidates to understand. Their speediness in particular stands out. When building our assessments, we applied the principle that “a little goes a long way.” Each test item does a lot of work, together measuring the Big Five dimensions and an array of underlying traits. That allows us to provide a quick experience that is easy for candidates to complete. The candidates themselves tell the story: among those who start the assessment, over 98% complete it.
2. Traitify assessments are flexible.
Whether you’re hiring for an entry-level warehouse position, a specialty retail trainee, or a restaurant manager, the same Traitify personality assessment can be used. We can therefore provide assessment data for every role, at every level, in every industry. That’s powerful.
We achieve this by using the same short and nimble assessment structure for every organization. The customization comes from the job-specific scoring benchmarks that our team creates for clients. During this process, we’re focused on understanding the real experiences of job holders. Our team goes to the source via conversations with the real people who know a role best, the employees themselves. This allows us to deliver a truly custom solution, and our ability to scale across different jobs is far greater than an approach that requires building and testing a separate assessment for every role.
3. Traitify assessments are serious about scientific rigor.
Many of us have entertained ourselves with mindless surveys or silly quizzes online. If you’ve ever clicked on a link to find out what color your aura is or what Hogwarts house you would be, you’re familiar with this sort of content. So how is a Traitify assessment different?
You’ll find the answer in our multi-phase test development studies involving thousands of participants. Our assessments are backed by our technical manuals, where we provide detailed results of our investigations of each version’s validity, internal consistency, test-retest reliability, and more. There’s no black box here. Our highly transparent, data-centered approach to test development means our clients — and their candidates — can trust that our assessments do what they claim to do while meeting or exceeding industry standards for psychometric data.
4. Traitify assessments are fundamentally human.
OK, so it’s faster and easier and scientifically-validated. But what’s the point? What’s the end result of streamlining this?
Well, we believe the value of an assessment is to help you learn more about your candidates and to hire better employees. The more candidates who complete the assessment, the better you’ll ultimately hire, and the better work your organization will get done.
Of course, it can be tricky to clearly define what “better” actually means. It can differ by organization, but generally speaking, a “better” frontline hire is someone who is hired quickly, happy, productive, and has staying power — maybe even someone who has upward mobility in the organization. That’s better. And our assessment is driving it:
- Traitify assessment clients have seen a 21% reduction in short-term turnover.
- Fast casual restaurant chain Captain D’s leveraged Traitify assessments to reduce turnover by 38% across 320 locations.
- Compass Group, one of the world’s largest food service organizations, reduced time to hire by four days by giving managers more information and confidence to prioritize the right applicants and make hiring critical decisions.
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It’s an exciting time for HR technology as we innovate toward diversified platforms that can meet talent needs across all stages of the employment journey. Combine that with our entering the golden age of AI, and the future brightens further. Assessments — and the technology around them — have changed for the better, and there’s no going back.
Organizations no longer have to choose between scientific rigor and the candidate experience. They no longer have to burn bridges with steps that job seekers dislike or distrust. Yesterday’s assessments made us think, there’s gotta be a better way. Now, at last, there is.
