“The challenge of hiring the right candidate has always been one of the most important puzzles a company needs to solve in order to grow.”
by Smarthveer Sidana, Co-founder and CEO, HireQuotient
Hiring Right – Essential But Difficult
The challenge of hiring the right candidate has always been one of the most important puzzles a company needs to solve in order to grow. Hiring the wrong candidate can cost as much as 30-100% of their annual salary in direct costs and lost productivity, and for a startup, the disruption can be significant. However, at most companies, the process for screening and selection has not changed since the pre-Internet era – they look at CVs and guess who to invite to interview, then spend many valuable senior hours talking to unsuitable candidates. They often unwittingly bake in historical biases, such as gender preference, school preference, etc.
The Great Resignation has made things worse
The hiring challenge has been exacerbated by the Great Resignation. In our conversations with a range of companies, we heard of attrition rates of around 30% for professional services and up to 50% in marketing. This means that they will need to recruit nearly twice as many people as the previous years, just to avoid shrinking. Senior resources are spending too much time in interviews, and it is starting to take its toll. And the bad news? Experts do not think that we will be returning to ‘the old normal’ any time soon.
Business skills are hard to assess accurately
While coding tests and the like have helped improve technical hiring, an effective business skills test has remained elusive. Companies have tried to use personality/psychometric tests, General Cognitive Ability/IQ tests or knowledge tests as proxies for the required skills and competencies. While they may give you some directional indication of a candidate’s ability, none of these tools answer the essential question – does this candidate have the right skills for the job?
What does the ideal business skills assessment need to do?
- Be customisable to the specific scope of the role.
- Provide realistic scenarios simulating the role they are being hired to do.
- Test candidate’s ability to apply knowledge to overcome challenges within the role.
- Accurately distinguish between those who do or do not have the required skills.
- Be engaging and interesting enough to provide a positive candidate experience.
That is why we created HireQuotient. Our Virtual Interviewers simulate in-person Round 1 skill interviews to help you answer the key question – can this candidate do the job?
How HireQuotient can help
HireQuotient’s Virtual Interviewers are:
Objective – they do not know (or have any way to care) about the candidate’s background.
- Scalable – they can run hundreds, even thousands, of interviews at the same time, and can even be designed to provide non-identical assessments to each candidate.
- Consistent – the same answer gets the same score, every time.
We take roles and skills that, on the surface, seem difficult to test in an interview (much less an online interview!), and find ways to automate them without losing the richness of a live interview. For example, the infamous consulting case interview is a 30 minute discussion to try to solve a business problem. Most people would have thought it is impossible to create a Virtual Interviewer that accurately predicts performance in a subsequent live interview, but that is exactly what we did.
What roles can HireQuotient assess?
We can now assess candidates for
- Consulting
- Private equity
- Venture capital
- Management Associate/graduate hiring
- Project management
- Product management
- Sales and marketing
We achieve this by combining top quality content, designed by leading subject matter experts, with cutting-edge technology that provides best-in-class experiences for both candidate and recruiter. Our team’s in-depth knowledge of the challenges faced in the recruitment process means that HireQuotient is designed to solve the many challenges facing hiring managers and recruiting teams every day.
Are you ready to Assess More, Interview Less, Hire Better?
We are already trusted by leading global companies and organisations such as Boston Consulting Group, Singapore Power, and Business Sweden – are you ready to join the HireQuotient revolution?
About the author :
Smarth is the Co-founder & CEO of HireQuotient. He started his career at the Boston Consulting Group, and has also worked with many global business schools & education ministries in the UK and India to help them map the skills required in the future of work. He graduated with a Bachelors in Chemical Engineering from IIT Delhi, and was recently recognised as one of the ’35 Under 35 Entrepreneurs’ by Entrepreneur Magazine
About HireQuotient:
HireQuotient’s virtual interviewers help you screen out candidates based on whether they have the right skills for the job. They do this by testing their knowledge application skills by giving them virtual scenarios similar to what they would encounter on the job. Just as the coding tests screen candidates for technical skills, HireQuotient screens for core business and problem-solving skills applicable to many non-tech roles.
Some of the roles that HireQuotient can help you assess include:
- Management Associates
- Strategy/Management Consultants
- Project Manager/Change Managers
- Product Managers
- Sales and Business Development
- Email Marketing
- Other professional services such as, private equity, venture capital, investment banking, etc.
Their goal is to help you Assess More, Interview Less, Hire Better.
HireQuotient is already working with global blue-chip companies, and has done 50K+ interviews in 40+ countries. They have helped clients to –
- Identify hidden gems
- Save 30-50% of interview time per hire
- Reduce gender gap by 20%, improving diversity
They do this through a combination of smart content written by experienced professionals, and AI-powered technology that enables them to
- Offer chatbot-powered skill assessments built around realistic work scenarios
- Test how candidates answer structured questions based on data provided and arrive at a final recommendation
- Generate insights into each candidate’s job-specific skills and business competencies
HireQuotient can also be used to objectively test existing team members, e.g., as part of initiatives to improve L&D and measure skills within the team. They provide a detailed skills report for each candidate upon completion of the assessment.
