Skills testing started as an alternative screening method for overwhelmed teams and snowballed into a hiring revolution. Here’s what we’re changing in the product to make your shift to skills-based hiring a whole lot smoother.
Toggl Hire steps into bigger platform(s) 😉
Toggl Hire began as the most efficient candidate screening tool. As a remote company, we struggled with high volumes of applications and tedious manual screening tasks, so we built a product to unbottleneck this hiring stage.
This January, we rolled out asynchronous video tests as an additional screening method. Video tests are great for assessing job-specific soft skills like communication and critical thinking in a scalable way, early in the process. You still get to see the human on the other side of the internet cable, but you don’t need to “get on a call”. Makes candidates happy and hiring teams more efficient.
With the option to add Custom Tests, we ended up with three different types of skills assessments and no way of combining them into one role-specific assessment flow.
You can say a lightbulb 💡 went off, and we knew the platform had to be reworked to fit the long-term vision. So the work began.
TL;DR: We rebuilt the Toggl Hire platform to cover all steps from candidate screening to the final hiring decision – meaning, you can now screen, assess, shortlist, and select the best-fit candidates on one platform. It’s time we tell you how it works!
What’s changing, exactly?
On a global level, companies are shifting rapidly to a skills-based hiring process:
✔️ It’s a lot less risky – feel confident knowing every hire is a quality hire
✔️ It’s a lot faster – no manual screening or time wasted in bad interviews
✔️ It’s a lot fairer – bias-free screening lets the best candidates move forward
✔️ It’s a lot cheaper – saved time can be reallocated to more important tasks
And product-wise, we’re introducing a customizable, role-specific hiring pipeline that will replace stand-alone skills tests. From now on, building a skills-based recruiting funnel will be as easy as creating a Spotify playlist:
✔️ Launch a Job role with pre-suggested multiple assessments
✔️ Stack different types of tests into one flow, including the newly added Homework Assessments placeholder:
✔️ Use test scores to create a data-driven shortlisting process
✔️ Automate candidate rejections and next-step invites with email templates
✔️ Build a searchable pool of vetted candidates for future job openings
We think of skills assessments as a system for surfacing the most qualified candidates.
One-off tests can help solve isolated problems, such as a high volume of applications, but they can’t fix other, bigger problems in recruitment:
– unconscious biases that sabotage diversity in hiring
– dragged-out hiring processes that lose great candidates
– over-reliance on interviewing skills that leads to bad hires
To fix recruitment, we need to embrace a more data-driven approach to screening, shortlisting, and selecting candidates – and that’s exactly what skills-based hiring offers.
Why is skills-based hiring the future of sustainable recruitment?
Degrees don’t guarantee competence. Past experiences and highly embellished CVs don’t guarantee competence. Great interviewing skills don’t guarantee practical, on-the-job competence. But what can give teams great confidence in their hiring decisions is seeing candidates perform well in job-specific skills assessments. Demonstrated ability is a lot more convincing than a well-polished interview technique.
Industry research overwhelmingly shows that the traditional hiring process is flawed:
- 78% of job seekers lie on their resume (source)
- While recruiters spend as meager as 7.4 seconds on average to screen a resume (source)
- 81% of people have lied about themselves at some point during the interview process (source)
- Various studies have demonstrated that poor performers grossly overestimate their performances because their incompetence deprives them of the skills needed to recognize their deficits. Top performers, on the other hand, usually underestimate their capabilities assuming their peers performed just as well as they did.
Overall, most people struggle to objectively assess their own capabilities, which leads to wildly exaggerated CVs, faked interviews, and, eventually, poor performance on the job. The only way for recruiters and hiring managers to get an accurate snapshot of a candidate’s future performance is to assess the core skills required for the job. It all clicks, right?
”We rebuilt Toggl Hire to make skills-based hiring an objectively better alternative to the traditional hiring process. With thousands of expert-created questions and multiple types of assessments at the ready, hiring teams can create a skills-based hiring pipeline for any role in a matter of a few clicks,” says Alari Aho, CEO at Toggl Hire. “Hiring managers no longer need to worry about making a poor hire or overlooking a great candidate – they can trust the process to spotlight the best-fit people.”
What’s coming up next?
Now that the hard work is complete and the platform is ready to scale, we’re relying on three principles to guide our product roadmap:
- How can we make the hiring process even more efficient?
– adding more pipeline automations, such as test archiving, test pausing, automatic next-step invites and more
– providing interview cheatsheets to reduce prep time
– offering baked-in analytics reports for KPI tracking
– adding qualifying questions for streamlined screening
– simplifying sourcing with a vetted candidate database
- How can we help hiring teams make better-informed hiring decisions?
– expanding Homework assessments to more skills
– allowing workspaces to create and save questions in their private question library
– improving team collaboration and communication through notifications, Slack integration, and workspace changelog
- How can we help companies improve the candidate experience?
– launching a candidate portal for automated application updates
– providing a library of email templates to send timely feedback
– providing candidate satisfaction reports to help employers improve
We’re excited about the opportunities these platform changes have given us. And we’re only getting started on building the modern skills-based hiring pipeline for companies that want a leaner, fairer, faster way of recruiting top people.
But enough from us – sign up for free, experience the future of hiring. 😍
Juste loves investigating through writing. A copywriter by trade, she spent the last ten years in startups, telling stories and building marketing teams. She works at Toggl Hire and writes about how businesses can recruit really great people.
