How to assess talent acquisition skills

Finding and recruiting talented individuals is a skill. Talent acquisition specialists source the right candidates, build professional relationships, provide support through the interview process, and often train and onboard new employees.

Talent acquisition professionals bring a delicate balance of sales skills, communication, marketing, organization, business acumen, and employment law knowledge to a company. Their primary role is to ensure that job applicants choose your business, not someone else’s.

TestGorilla offers a range of pre-employment tests to help you measure a candidate’s skills beyond their resume. You can find a candidate who not only has the technical skills to excel in their role but the soft skills, motivation, and personality to gel with your team.

Let’s explore the skills and traits a talent acquisition specialist would need to be successful in their role and how you can test for those capabilities.

What is a talent acquisition skills assessment?

A talent acquisition skills assessment enables you to measure the soft and hard skills necessary for the role, as well as a candidate’s practical experience. 

The assessment is made up of multiple skills tests to determine a candidate’s technical capabilities, hard skills like business acumen, and soft skills like communication, personality, and motivation. 

The assessment enables you to understand how a prospective talent acquisition specialist will interact with future applicants, their communication style, and their knowledge of GDPR and privacy. It can also help you measure how they organize their workload and what technology they use to source candidates. 

Talent acquisition skills assessments can be customized to measure whatever capabilities are necessary to thrive in your business. For example, you can include culture-add and motivation tests to determine a candidate’s fit within a team and their expectations for the role. 

Other relevant tests can include personality type, language proficiency, and spreadsheet knowledge. These tests are invaluable for those hiring in a small business or team where personalities are amplified. 

In addition, you should be sure to test a candidate’s knowledge of your company’s specialism. For example, if you work in IT and software development, your talent acquisition professional will need a robust understanding of the industry to know when they’ve found the right person for the job.

Why are talent acquisition skills important? 

Talent acquisition skills help recruiters identify the right candidates and induct them successfully. This will reduce your overall recruitment costs, create a diverse and inclusive workforce, and build a strong employer brand. 

Let’s explore the reasons why talent acquisition skills are so important.

Helps attract top candidates

A talent acquisition specialist’s main role is to attract and recruit top talent into your organization. They do this by sourcing candidates online or in person, building relationships with them, providing support through the interview process, and onboarding them to the company. 

The relationship they build with candidates will significantly enhance the likelihood that a talented individual will choose your organization over another. This helps you build a highly skilled team and strengthens your employer brand. 

Reduces employee turnover

Talent acquisition specialists reduce employee turnover by ensuring the right candidates are hired in the first place. Did you know that the average cost of recruiting, onboarding, and training a new employee is $39,000?

Skilled recruiters prevent this cost through relationship building, interviewing, and a positive onboarding experience. This streamlined recruitment process not only ensures you hire the right candidate but saves company resources in training, recruiting, and re-employment. 

Strengthens employer brand

Hiring the right candidates ensures you have a team of experts for all upcoming projects. This creates a better customer experience, drives peer-to-peer learning, and enhances workplace culture. Positive workplace experiences contribute to your employer’s brand and create better customer and employee relationships.

A strong employer brand builds a positive reputation for your business, further attracting talent to the organization. It reduces the time taken to fill positions and improves the overall quality of candidates.

Drives organizational growth

You need to hire the right people at the right time to grow sustainably. Talent acquisition specialists can help with that. 

Top talent drives and supports business growth. Your talent acquisition specialists are able to identify skills gaps, anticipate future hiring needs, and develop proactive recruitment strategies to ensure your business grows at the correct rate.

By securing the right employees, talent acquisition specialists contribute to building high-performing teams that drive innovation, productivity, and overall business success. 

Improves the candidate experience

Talent acquisition specialists play a vital role in improving the candidate experience. They provide support to candidates, guide them through the interview process, and offer a smooth onboarding to the company.  

This level of support creates a positive recruitment process regardless of the outcome.

What skills and traits are important for talent acquisition employees? 

Talent acquisition specialists need a diverse range of hard and soft skills, traits, and job-specific knowledge in order to excel in their roles. Let’s take a closer look at the most important skills and traits for job success.

Communication skills

First impressions count, and talent acquisition specialists are often the first person from your company that a candidate will interact with. Therefore, all verbal and written communication must be appropriate and of high quality.

Employment law knowledge

Hiring new employees is an exciting time for both the business and the candidate. However, there are a number of legal processes you need to adhere to when onboarding new employees to your business. 

Your talent acquisition specialist must be well-versed in employment documentation, tax forms, and ethical hiring practices. Not only does this ensure a smooth onboarding process for new employees, but it legally safeguards your business in case you are audited. 

Business acumen

Choosing an employee from a pool of candidates is a strategic business decision, and it’s not as simple as who was the best interviewee. 

A talent acquisition specialist considers a candidate’s culture fit, how they interact with your current team members, their ambitions, and their working style. All these factors contribute to the success of your organization.

Data analysis skills

Although TestGorilla automatically creates easy-to-understand candidate reports, your talent acquisition specialist must have strong data analysis skills to digest the information.

Data analysis enables managers to make smarter, bias-free hiring decisions to employ top candidates. In addition, using data to make hiring decisions shows that you have followed a fair and traceable process.

Sales skills

Convincing a candidate to join your team or business over another will require relationship-building, problem-solving, and persuasion skills. 

These skills are essentially sales skills, and a talent acquisition specialist with good sales skills will seamlessly convince a candidate to join your organization over another. They’ll discuss the relative benefits, confidently chat about culture, and ultimately build a strong relationship with that candidate.

Organizational skills

Organizational skills are key for talent acquisition specialists. They often hire multiple positions at once, manage stakeholders from several departments, and process tens of job applications per week. Good organizational skills are key for this level of multitasking.

In addition, talent acquisition specialists need to have strong time-management skills, excellent planning and coordination, and attention to detail.

Skills and traits tests 

TestGorilla offers more than 300 pre-employment tests from which to tailor the perfect talent acquisition skills assessment. You can incorporate tests that evaluate the skills, traits, and qualities most suited to your company’s needs. 

Talent acquisition 

The Talent Acquisition test is the cornerstone test for evaluating a candidate’s experience in talent sourcing and recruitment. It only takes 10 minutes and can be used to measure recruitment analytics skills, so you can see to what extent a candidate uses data to make recruitment decisions and how comfortable they are with data analysis. 

Communication

TestGorilla’s Communication Skills test evaluates written and verbal communication and active listening skills. It also helps you gauge whether a candidate can summarize important information effectively. 

Talent acquisition specialists need a range of communication styles to cater to multiple tiers within the company, from senior executives to department heads, HR colleagues, and candidates. 

HR fundamentals

Ensuring your business follows a fair and unbiased recruitment procedure sits with your talent acquisition specialist. They need to ensure that your business complies with all employment laws. 

The HR Fundamentals Skills test helps you determine your talent acquisition specialist’s working knowledge of HR and employment law. It also enables you to measure relationship management skills, the ability to recommend actionable solutions to problems, as well as general HR expertise. 

Business judgment

The Business Judgment test lets you measure a candidate’s ability to make smart business decisions and assesses their understanding of personnel management, mergers, acquisitions, sales, and marketing skills. This test helps you hire business and recruitment professionals who understand the importance of strategy and innovation. 

Data analysis 

Talent acquisition specialists deal with large volumes of data in their roles. Whether it’s candidate scores, benchmarking, or calculation attrition to fill skills gaps, a good talent specialist should score well on the Working with Data test.

This test focuses on how candidates can input, understand, and manipulate data within a spreadsheet. It also tests how well they can create visualizations like graphs and charts using the data provided.

Sales skills

In this modern job market, a candidate may be considering multiple job offers from many attractive organizations. Your talent acquisition specialist must ensure that skilled individuals want to apply to your company’s open roles.

TestGorilla’s Outside Sales (B2B) Skills test lets you measure how well a candidate can overcome objections, qualify leads, manage opportunities, and more. 

Organizational skills

Talent acquisition specialists have to spin multiple plates at once to succeed in their roles. As a result, the organizational skills included in the Administrative Assistant test are invaluable.

This test measures skills including attention to detail, organization, time management, and problem-solving. It assesses whether a candidate has the skills to improve your everyday processes and streamline recruitment operations. 

How TestGorilla can help you find the right talent acquisition employee

TestGorilla’s range of more than 300 pre-employment tests is the perfect tool to help you find your next talent acquisition specialist. 

TestGorilla helps you uncover your applicant’s skills beyond what’s on their resume. This includes soft skills such as communication, active listening, and the ability to strategize, and hard skills like employment law knowledge, data analysis, and sales skills.

In addition, TestGorilla enables hiring managers to create their own custom test questions and combine up to five tests into a bespoke assessment. 

By leveraging TestGorilla’s wide range of pre-employment tests, you can identify top performers in your pool of candidates, build high-performing teams, and create business success.

Ready to start your recruitment journey with TestGorilla? Sign up for a free plan today.