Candidate Assessment Tool

A candidate assessment tool is designed to record notes and create a scoring system to help minimized the "gut feel" mistakes that happen when we interview candidates. Often this tool is some sort of interview evaluation form.

Why Create More Paper?

This is a valid question. There are two reasons that make a written assessment important, emotion and documentation.

When you put pen to paper and write down your scores or results, it helps you more accurately capture the content of the interview. When interviewing multiple people this becomes especially important.

Also when you document your process, sometimes it reveals trends or patterns about interview styles. This can be beneficial to the company, and interviewer. For example, if you do a round robin interview and one interviewer rates everyone as top notch for everything, the they probably are not a very good interviewer and you don't wan this person as part of future panels. The opposite is true as well. If nobody scores well then it is not likely that this interviewer is going to reflect well on your company. Might want to pass on having them on the interview team next time.

Legal Aspects of a Candidate Assessment Tool

There are other aspects related to documentation that are related to the legal aspects of how employees are selected. While there is great latitude in the process, having a documented process that justifies hiring someone is helpful if a legal situation ever comes up.

Keys to an Effective Assessment Tool

There are two keys to an effective candidate assessment tool, first it must be used for every candidate. Second there must be a weighted scoring system that produces a final score.

Whenever untrained interviewers are used to interview candidates, the recommendations can be based on gut feel or how well they liked the candidate. If there is an evaluation form, some of those factors may be lessened to some extent. This is why it must be used for each candidates.

The scoring process is one of the best ways to create an unbiased representation of how well the interview went. The scoring must be done in such a way that the interviewer scores the candidate and each score is then weighted for it's importance in the performance of the job. The weighting for the job is kept separate from the interviewer so as not to bias the scoring.

The Results

Of course this tool is not meant to make the decision. It should factor into the decision and used to develop an overall picture of the candidates. The candidate assessment tool is merely a tool to separate facts from those gut instincts.

Sample Form As a courtesy, we have linked to a request page where you can get a sample candidate assessment form for your own use. Just fill in the request form and you will receive a link to the sample form.

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