The recruiters focus more on hard skills.
A McKinsey research of 2012 mentions that the problem is not located at the creation of new jobs but at the lack of candidates’ skills.
The lack of hard skills at employees at a low hierarchical level means:
- additional training cost
- additional manhours of colleagues that will need to help the newly hired,
- and in the case of replacement, additional cost at the HR department
All this leads to augmented operational cost of the company and minimize its competitiveness.
All of you have noted that:
- The candidates do not always have the hard skills that they mention at their CV’s and
- at positions at low hierarchical levels hard skills are more important than soft skills because most employees won’t need to lead a team or make important decisions. What they will need to be able to do is perform their duties precisely and in a timely manner, so that their managers can rely on their work.
A recent research (which was conducted by Elance-oDesk & Millennial Branding) shows that 55% of the recruiters focuses only on hard skills and a mere 21% on personality, while in the future, 45% expects that will become even more hard skills focused.
The new tools that the HR department has at its disposal do not include simple multiple choice questions but examine in depth the skills of the examinee at actual working conditions.
Hard skills during recruitment
Let’s say that you need to hire a web developer with php and MySQL knowledge or a data analyst with a good level at excel.
What most companies do the last years is that they submit the candidates to an initial ranking test along with the job announcement, so as to obtain a first screening of the candidates and later on to a second test for greater precision.
The advantage of the method with the automated tests is that that provides the opportunity to more candidates of remote areas to participate. Given the difficult economic situation at our country, it is highly unlikely that a candidate will travel from Thessaloniki to Athens just to take part at a first interview. If, however, the candidate knew that he was one of the e.g. 10 that the HR department has invited for an interview, then he would know that the chances to be hired are more.
Hard Skills during the assessment of the current employees
So, we come to the case where we need to assess the entire personnel. Either because we need to ascertain the level of the employees or in the case of an acquisition or merger so that we are in position to know with objective criteria who is in position to do what.
The trend in this case as well is to use tools that will evaluate in actual working conditions.
I will refer to data from an assessment that was performed with our software. Out of 615 employees of a certain company, 518 failed. This is a stunning 83%.
And I am talking about basic computer skills: Windows, Word, Excel.
Imagine having employees at your company who need more than 1 minute to send a simple e-mail with an attachment!
Hard Skills for employee development
Recently Linkedin has acquired Lynda.com, one of the largest videolessons suppliers. The benefits for a company of the use of e-learning are definitely important.
It would be preferable, however, if we could reassure that the employee has actually consolidated the video-lesson and didn’t leave it running while he went to get a cup of coffee.
A recent research of 2014 (GreenJobInterview’s) has shown that the most common reason why companies do not take advantage of all the options that the current technology allows for is that at a 36% they do not know enough about this software.
The software that we have developed allows you to train or evaluate with an automated test your candidates or your staff either at your place or at the candidates’ choice of place (even at home), for a multitude of applications at basic, advanced or specialized level.
Please pay attention to the basic level. It is not obvious. The basic level computer certificates prove almost nothing. I have been working at this sector for more than 15 years and I know very well the skills that such certificates represent.
I don’t mean to wrong everyone who has obtained a certificate. There are definitely very capable people among them. By assessing the skills with an automated test for each one, you will be able to know their actual level for each application and for each question.
Download the hr recruitment assessment and development candidate and employee test tool that we have created.
Thank you for your attention.