10 Smart Hiring Tools To Help You Fill Positions Wisely

By The Kin Team

May 9, 2016

This is the fourth piece in a multi-part series on smart hiring. This article explores what specific smart hiring tools can help a small company make better-informed hiring decisions, and what to look for in the tools your own team chooses.

Wired’s founding editor Kevin Kelly wrote several years ago that no company can spend too much time or effort on finding and hiring the right people. “The alternative is to manage tough, which is much more time consuming,” he said.

Of course, no company has unlimited time and energy to devote to hiring. Most don’t have the time and energy to devote to learning how to hire better through trial and error. This post should help smaller teams fast-forward through that trial and error.

A good starting point here would be Google’s SVP of People Operations, Laszlo Bock, who writes extensively at Wired about how his company approaches hiring, particularly how Google assesses candidates. The core of its strategy involves two broad practices:

Structured interviews to assess how the person behaves and responds to specific situations, and
A handful of personality tests that gauge a candidate’s cognitive skills, conscientiousness and capacity for leadership.

Below are 10 tools that can help any company recreate Google’s methods of candidate assessments. But first, it’s important to understand how to navigate the $500 million universe of recruiting tools so you can find the right tool for your business’ specific needs.

How to Select the Right Personality Test

There won’t be a catch-all personality test that every company can use for its hiring. Different tests apply to assess leadership skills among salespeople and empathy among nurses, for example. Actually, most companies will find they need different personality tests for hiring across different departments.

Whitney Martin, a measurement strategist at ProActive Consulting, tells the Society for Human Resource Management that the best personality tests, regardless of application, still have certain commonalities:

They measure personal traits that don’t change over time.
They distill results into data that allow apples-to-apples comparisons among applicants.
They can assess how candid a candidate’s responses actually are.
They reliably produce the same results over and over again for the same person.
They have a track record of predicting job performance.

Further, University of Minnesota professor of industrial psychology Dr. Deniz Ones tells Talent Management that any assessments should also meet professional guidelines such as those laid out by

the American Psychological Association,
the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology
and the International Test Commission.

What to Look For in Candidate Vetting Systems

If you plan to grow quickly, or if your company already counts its team members by the dozen, it’s probably best to invest in software that can help automate the workflow for recruiting, screening and hiring candidates. The layers of complexity you could add to this process are nearly infinite, and the best tools for such processes simplify your work.

“As you consider an [applicant tracking system], it is important to find a system that can streamline and organize your recruiting workflow through automation, allowing you to handle a large volume of candidates without hefty amounts of paperwork,” Jared Lasonde at software company Bullhorn writes. “You should also ensure that its functionality will improve communication and foster a better alliance between your organization’s recruiters, hiring managers, and prospective applicants.”

The team at Jobvite has put together an exhaustive resource on how to choose this kind of software, and their guide brings up three further points worth mentioning here.

Make sure the software is scalable. “Scalable ATS systems work just as well with 100 applicants as they do with 10,000 applicants,” they write. “Ten thousand applicants might seem like a bit of a stretch, but it is better to make certain that your ATS system can support your big-picture objectives than to invest in a system that will let you down when you need it the most.”
Make sure it keeps you compliant with relevant laws. This includes the multiple regulations laid out by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs and any other federal regulations that might apply.
Make sure it offers analytics. Solid data will help you track performance, identify areas where you can improve, and discover any bottlenecks in your hiring process.

10 Tools to Look Into

With that said, here are several tools that will help you screen candidates meaningfully, manage the recruiting and hiring processes, and keep track of what parts of those processes get results.

The Predictive Index

The Predictive Index is one of the leading providers of behavioral, cognitive and skills assessment tools for businesses and other large organizations. The company backs its methodology with more than six decades of practical experience and scientific research.

EQ-i 2.0

MHS Assessments’ EQ-i 2.0 is a popular tool for exploring an individual’s emotional intelligence. It’s built on top of a 1-5-15 Factor Structure that delivers one score, which breaks down into five composite scores that reveal aptitude across 15 different emotional dimensions, including emotional self-awareness, assertiveness and stress tolerance.

StrengthsFinder

The Clifton StrengthsFinder, now owned by Gallup, is based on the work of the late Dr. Donald O. Clifton, whose research revealed a reliable system for discovering the skills, knowledge and talents each person possesses.

Nect

Nect has created an app that works for desktops, laptops and mobile devices to streamline most companies’ hiring processes. The app posts to relevant job boards and major outlets, automatically helps filter and sort candidates, and integrates with your everyday communication tools to connect with the applicants you select.

POP Screen

The Self Management Group’s POP Screen tool is designed specifically to vet great salespeople by assessing their talents, the levels of effort they’ve demonstrated in past roles, and their fit for the position for which they’ve applied.

Viasto

Viasto adds a layer of efficiency to your recruitment by helping you set up structured video interviews. This lets companies assess candidates who might not otherwise be in a position to meet face-to-face, but still with the rigor to identify the most qualified candidates.

Revelian

The Revelian’s Cognitive Ability Test assesses a candidate’s ability to acquire, retain, organize and apply various types of information. “People who score well on the Revelian Cognitive Ability Test are more likely to demonstrate strong job performance, make effective decisions, successfully reason and solve problems, [and] respond appropriately to new or complex situations,” the company writes.

Workable

Workable has created what Business News Daily has described as the best recruiting software for small businesses. The platform lets companies post job ads, process applications, manage interviews and even help onboard new hires.

Kaleo

Kaleo is a bit of an outlier on this list in that the software isn’t specifically designed for recruiting or hiring. Instead, Kaleo turns communication tools such as company email inboxes into collaboration platforms so that institutional knowledge can be shared easily.

“These ‘knowledge networks,’ which are curated by internal subject matter experts, are built around questions and answers, positioning Kaleo as sort of a Quora meets Slack meets Sidekick,” Matt Charney writes at Recruiting Daily. This capability could be especially useful in keeping your HR team up-to-date on regulations, and in onboarding new hires.

Talent Dojo

For companies that already have gained traction and a large audience, Qwalify’s Talent Dojo could be a powerful way to find candidates who fit your company’s culture. The platform combs your existing marketing channels to find brand advocates and audience members who already understand and promote what your company does. It can even assess who among those audience members are most engaged or most familiar with your company’s culture. Qwalify points out that recruiting from this perspective can save 75% of the time and money it would otherwise cost to hire someone.