Firms are searching for new team members with the skills to help them accelerate agility and meet the challenges of a changing world. But they are struggling to find recruits with the right skills to fill job vacancies.
Assessing people’s skills during recruitment can help ensure they find the right ones, says online assessment provider Questionmark.
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The skills firms need are changing. Companies listed 33% more skills on job adverts in 2020 than they did in 2017. And job seekers are not always honest about what they can deliver. Some 78% of job applicants admit to misrepresenting, or considering misrepresenting, their skills during the application.
The United States government recently reported 9.2 million unfilled job vacancies. A similar number of people are searching for work. This suggests a mismatch between the skills employers need and those available.
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The new Questionmark report, “Skills, Culture, Vocation: Finding the Right Recruits” encourages employers to improve their recruitment decisions by:
- Checking the skills of job candidates – assessments give real information about a candidate’s current skills base. Questionmark provides the platform to build and deliver bespoke tests for a wide variety of needs.
- Testing for judgment – situational judgment assessments (SJAs) are a way of measuring if a candidate can make considered decisions.
- Measuring potential – Questionmark Thinking Skills by Cambridge Assessment enables employers to measure critical-thinking abilities which can indicate how a candidate might develop throughout their career.
John Kleeman, Founder of Questionmark, said: “To accelerate their agility and thrive in a changing business environment, employers are seeking more skills than ever before. By testing the abilities of candidates during the recruitment process, hirers may discover that a potential employee has more skills than their resume suggests.
“Candidates won’t always tick all the boxes, but by measuring potential, an employer can identify who has the aptitude to learn and develop.”
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