Job-specific skills quiz: Customise tools to test applicants

How do you know the person you’re about to hire is who they say they are?

You’ve seen a CV, and it ticked all the boxes.

You’ve met with them and chatted and they’ve passed that initial test.

But is that really enough these days? Just log into any of the free AI platforms, throw in a job description, and ask it to give you a relevant CV, covering letter, and talking points, and almost anyone with an average level of charisma and likability can probably trick the usual safeguards.

What if you hire a copywriter and then discover that under pressure and scrutiny, they don’t know their “where-s” and “were-s” from their “we’re-s,” and couldn’t pin the apostrophe on the donkey’s proverbial?

Imagine journalists that don’t know media law, payroll personnel who’ve never touched an industry standard system, or an accountant who can’t do maths in their head. You get the idea…

In this article, we’re going to look at how you can customise and use online quizzes to check if the people you’re hiring to help operate your company actually possess the necessary skills to do their jobs.

The role of job-specific skills quizzes in modern recruitment

The modern workplace is admittedly unforgiving to applicants, with so much competition and specialisation, both in skills and experience, that the concepts of transferable skills and being trained in-house – commonplace once upon a time – have gone the way of the dinosaurs.

This is because business today moves fast. AI and improving mobile and internet technology means organisations are running on shorter and shorter cycles, and the need to match skills, knowledge, and experience faster than we used to is unavoidable.

The concept of an SME or a start-up training someone in-house from scratch is laughable, when you consider that the role may have become obsolete by the time they’re ready to earn their keep.

This makes the temptation to inflate one’s skills or experience in a relevant field extremely tempting for candidates to “figure out later,” and potentially costly for businesses.

A skills assessment in the form of a quiz is like a failsafe. It can just act as the canary in the coalmine to verify what someone is saying, without being too much of a commitment and a deterrent for quality applicants. It can also make for a very smooth candidate journey if you’re also using interactive quizzes for your onboarding and employee training.

Custom skills quiz examples for various job roles

You can use enterprise-grade quiz builders like Drimify to create your skills tests, and tailor them to your exact needs.

Let’s consider a few examples of the types of quizzes you could create to check you’re hiring the right people, depending on the position, and the industry.

Problem solving abilities quiz

This is a common one. Afterall, what is work, if not a company paying someone to solve a problem for them?

A customised problem solving quiz helps you in multiple ways.

You can use the variable question formats to include videos, text, or audio, to pose challenges specific to your business and the job role to the applicant. This not only tests their ability to find the right solution, but it’s also a soft onboarding. It can simulate what the job will be, and may potentially highlight to a candidate that they’re not cut out for the role, likely saving you time.

People management skills quiz

Again, this is a great way to get an insight into how someone manages.

Theoretically, anyone can manage a team, and it’s difficult to really disprove that someone has this experience. Afterall, everyone’s had some great line managers, and some line managers that got their job purely for having been there the longest.

You can pose very specific management challenges they might encounter, ask them how they would act through multiple choice questions, and you could even include open answer follow-up questions to ask them to explain their logic.

Discipline-specific knowledge quiz

Because Drimify quizzes are completely customisable, you can really tailor them to individual areas of study.

For example, if you need someone capable of using a complex legacy system or someone with an understanding of an outdated programming language, you can customise a quiz to get a pretty good idea of if they actually know what they’re talking about, or if they’re trying to wing it.

Whatever it is you need to know that they know, you can customise your quiz to act as a bespoke test.

Integrate custom skills quizzes into your hiring workflow

If people can cheat on their CV and covering letter, how is a digital quiz going to help?

It’s a valid question.

It really all depends where you want to include your job skills quiz in your hiring sequence. Is it something you share with participants before the interview stage, or is it a final assessment to confirm your decisions?

The thing is, any extra steps are a deterrent for applicants trying to bluff their way through a hiring process. Equally, quality candidates can get impatient if they feel like they’re having to jump through hoops.

It’s all a balance, and it will vary across industries.

Typically, an early stage job skills quiz can help you narrow down the number of applicants you bring to interview, which could lead to a more efficient, less labour intensive hiring process. However, going too early with your quizzes, i.e. having participants complete the tests automatically after applying, can be a blocker, as you’re giving them an extra hoop to go through.

The best practice is to sift through initial applications, and send personalised emails inviting participants to take the skills quizzes. Then it acts as an extra sifting phase to easily identify a smaller, higher quality pool of candidates to interview.

You can then go into more detail about the job specific questions, and it gives your interview approach a natural foundation.

Want to know more?