What is Top of the Funnel Skill Assessment?

Did you know that Google receives over 3 million applications per year and hires only 0.2% of those who apply?

Managing applicants at the top of the funnel can be a difficult task for the recruiting teams. A single job post in the IT industry could initiate hundreds or even thousands of applications.

So, what can be the most efficient way to deal with a huge volume of applicants?

Traditionally, companies would manually review applications as a way to narrow down the list of candidates. However, a big disadvantage in doing so is that it’s a time-consuming task and requires human resource effort. The alternative, more effective approach is to conduct a skill assessment test that automatically evaluates the candidate’s skills for the job.

What is a recruitment funnel?

A recruitment funnel is a step-by-step hiring process that starts from attracting the right candidates for assessing, screening, and interviewing to finally close the job by hiring.

May applicants enter the recruitment funnel, but only a small percentage of them make it through all phases of the hiring stage.

It takes several steps for recruiters to feel certain that the candidate has the right skills, experience, and personality. Likewise, the candidate also evaluates the company for its work culture. Therefore, the hiring funnel is a key component of the recruiting process.

Check out our extensive guide on What is a Recruitment Funnel, where we explain each step of the hiring funnel in-depth.

Candidates come in at the top of the funnel from multiple sources. At the bottom of the recruitment funnel, they accept an offer to join the company. However, between the process, the candidate may exit the funnel voluntarily or through a prompt by the recruiter.

What is top-of-funnel recruiting?

Top of the funnel recruiting majorly revolves around finding and screening the applicants to move qualified ones down the funnel.

The first step is to help candidates see your value and choose your employer brand in the talent market. However, many candidates may enter the recruitment funnel by accident and land the screening process at first.

As soon as the candidates enter the recruitment funnel, they need to pass through the screening stage. In this step, you select qualified candidates for the interview stage of your recruitment funnel. The aim is to only interview candidates who fulfill the skills criteria mentioned in your job description.

In recent times recruiters especially in tech have started to realize the flaws of resume screening. Therefore, many tech recruiters have added a skill assessment tool to their tech stack to screen candidates bias-free based on their skill and merit.

Screening at the top of the funnel recruitment is the most important step in your entire funnel. If you are looking for ways to reduce your time to hire or improve your shortlist quality, we recommend starting with improving your screening process with skill assessments.

What is a skill assessment?

A skill assessment evaluates potential employees for technical skills required to perform in a job. A skill assessment offers an unbiased, validated assessment of a candidate’s ability to perform on the job challenges.

These assessments can be in various formats that involve engaging activities, such as coding challenges or job simulations, to see how a candidate will perform in a real-world situation.

Fairness is another benefit of skill assessments, along with accuracy, efficiency, and being time and cost-effective. Manual resume checks are vulnerable to bias and subjectivity. Even the most well-trained recruiters are subject to unconscious biases that influence how they evaluate resumes. For example, some recruiters tend to recognize or highly regard prominent educational institutions, resulting in partiality.

Why do you need skill assessment to fuel top-of-funnel recruitment?

It’s easy to assume that attracting as many candidates as possible is an effective top-of-the-funnel strategy. However, the real effectiveness of this hiring step lies in making sure that the right candidates qualify for the next step of the funnel.

As they say, “weed out the duds and hold on to the studs!”

Therefore tech employers need efficient skill assessment tests to perform top-of-funnel screening. A skills-based hiring approach from the beginning of the recruitment funnel offers a number of benefits to both the candidates and recruiters.

Some of the benefits of using skill assessments are:

• Every candidate gets a fair opportunity to display their skills.
• Candidates do not lose an opportunity due to not adding the correct keywords in their resumes.
• Recruiters don’t lose their potential match because of resume screening errors.
• The time is not wasted going through countless spam applications.
• Recruiters can assess candidates for soft skills beyond what is mentioned in the resume.

When evaluated correctly, recruiters can develop a system that swiftly determines eligible candidates with whom the company can drive deeper engagement.

Therefore, skill assessment tests for technical hiring improves the overall recruitment process by saving a recruiter’s time and efforts and improving the recruitment metrics through every step of the funnel.

Why should you focus on the top-of-funnel skill assessment?

The most difficult task in modern remote recruiting is the screening process, which is often the bottleneck in every hiring process. The majority of top talent is rarely available in the job market. This is why developing a strategy to identify and engage passive candidates is critical.

This is excellent news for recruiters who want to make contact and initiate a conversation. Once recruiters engage with candidates, another crucial step is utilizing skill assessments to ensure efficient screening and a better shortlist quality for the interview stage. Online skill assessments quickly identify the strongest candidates by evaluating their technical ability in real-time.

To aid recruiting efforts and out-compete the market, the top of funnel stage is the most important in attracting and filtering the best technical talent. By fine-tuning this first step, recruiters can accurately assess candidates and eliminate manual screening processes.

Conclusion

Skill assessments at the top of funnel recruitment offer significant benefits to the recruiting team. It relieves recruiters of the burden of going over each CV carefully to screen out unqualified candidates. It also cuts down the time to interview each applicant and understand their technical skills only to realize they aren’t the right fit.

In contrast to a recruiter’s subjective perception, skill assessments provide an unbiased measure of a candidate’s practical abilities. While prejudice can still enter into other aspects of the recruitment process, objective skill tests lower the impact of unconscious bias on decision-making.

If this appears to be a lot of work, keep in mind that this is a funnel. The better tools you invest in, the more successful you will be at attracting and converting technical applicants into long-term and productive employees.

After completing the top-of-funnel skills assessment, recruiters should have a shorter but most qualified applicant pool. Skill assessments, with all their advantages, are a win for the candidates and the hiring teams. Automated skills assessment tools are the future of top-of-the-funnel recruitment.

WeCP (We Create Problems) is an industry-leading technical skill assessment software that auto-evaluates a large pool of candidates to give hiring teams a filtered selection of qualified candidates based on 12+ quality evaluation metrics. Talk to WeCP today.

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