The best candidate assessment tools

Ever since the “Great Resignation” of 2021 — when more than 38 million Americans quit their jobs in search of better pay, more flexibility, and better benefits — it’s been harder than ever to retain employees, let alone find new ones.

The recruitment process involves enticing the right candidates, keeping them engaged, and interviewing them sometimes multiple times or with multiple people up the chain of command. Then, if they’re still interested in the position, you have to offer the right compensation package in a timely manner or risk losing them and starting your search all over again.

To combat this long, tedious process, companies have begun implementing candidate assessment tools to test job prospects before offering them a position. With this software — which often includes various types of pre-employment assessments of ability, personality, and job knowledge — employers can not only speed up the hiring process but also make it more effective and efficient.

Fortunately, there are many candidate assessment tools available to help you find prospects that are the right fit for your company. Here are nine of the best options.

1. ThriveMap

With ThriveMap, you can create customized, pre-employment assessments to take candidates through a realistic work-day simulation and see how well they would fare in a role, a workplace, and an overall culture. Then, based on how they score against your hiring criteria — as well as how they compare to other candidates — you can decide whether to move forward to the next step of the hiring process.

2. Adaface

From coding and other aptitude tests to psychometric and on-the-job assessments, pre-employment screening software Adaface offers AI-powered functionality to find great candidates for your open positions, whether they’re current team members or recent college graduates. And thanks to its conversational chatbot — which can answer candidate FAQs and screen for multiple skill sets — you can find best-fit candidates fast.

3. Jotform

Online form builder Jotform helps users create fully customizable forms, PDFs, and apps from scratch or with one of its 10,000-plus premade templates. It’s a powerful, intuitive, and completely code-free tool, with ready-made templates spanning industries and professions — from education and healthcare to IT and marketing. It’s especially helpful for your company’s human resources department, offering a variety of HR templates, like job application and employee information forms as well as onboarding spreadsheets and recruitment trackers. Jotform’s test maker tool helps you create candidate assessment tests as well.

4. eSkill

Next on this list of candidate assessment tools is eSkill, which prides itself on minimizing poor hiring decisions and decreasing recruiting costs through detailed, customizable pre-employment tests. The platform offers 800 job-based and subject-based tests to choose from — for areas ranging from engineering and retail to government and healthcare. And thanks to its savings calculator, you can find out exactly how much money your recruitment team is saving with their assessments.

5. Applied

With recruitment software Applied’s anonymized job applications and skills-based assessments, you can create tests that are completely unbiased toward prospects — enabling a fair, ethical hiring process. Not only does Applied strongly boost diversity for companies that implement it, but it can also improve retention rates, provide automated feedback to every candidate, and save on recruitment costs.

6. Criteria

Whether you need to administer pre-employment tests, manage your candidate pipeline, or analyze and compare their results, assessment platform Criteria has you covered. It’s powerful, scalable, customizable, and accessible — enabling your candidates to take their assigned assessments anytime, anywhere. And with its wide range of integrations, Criteria fits easily into your hiring process, regardless of your industry.

7. iMocha

Skills assessment software iMocha touts an impressive skills library; customizable, comprehensive assessments; AI-enabled assessment proctoring; and 24-7 chat, email, and phone support to help you make better, more informed hiring decisions. Plus, since iMocha integrates with other powerful recruitment tools like Greenhouse, Jobvite, and Workable, there’s no need to leave the platform or work in disconnected silos.

8. Skillsarena

Through realistic job previews and situational judgment, skills, and psychometric assessments, recruitment tool Skillsarena helps you place the right people in the right roles. Skillsarena helps you ensure fair and accessible testing procedures, high-quality candidates, increased retention rates, and most importantly, a skilled, highly motivated, and successful workforce.

9. pymetrics

With recruiting platform pymetrics, you can do more than just find the best candidates to fill your open positions. You can also guide potential candidates to the right roles in the first place (and redirect those on your “maybe” list to other opportunities at your company that may better suit their skill set). What’s more, pymetrics uses fair, accurate, and objective algorithms that are routinely evaluated to remove bias from your hiring process.

With so many great people looking for their next rewarding yet challenging job opportunity, why should your company struggle to fill vacancies? Thanks to candidate assessment tools, you don’t have to. Not only will you save time, money, and resources year over year by implementing the right tool for your business, but you’ll be confident that you found the best, most qualified candidate for the role.