Thanks to a slowing economy and squeezed margins, job vacancies have shrunk. Clearly, that has made the selection of the best candidates from a larger pool a more stringent process than ever before. As Sarjeev Sethi, founder and CEO of the Noida-based HR consultancy People Con­nect Placements points out, regular “inter­view-type” questions have given way to more unusual ones that demand the candi­date to think on the spot. “You’re more likely to be asked what your top three fail­ures were and what you learnt from them than what your top three achievements were in your last job,” he says.

But that’s not quite how recruitment at several small and medium size enterprises works. Hiring in such companies is often focused on assessing a candidate’s technical skills with competency for a role treated as a checkbox on the list; even as it’s more important for smaller and high-growth companies to get people with the right atti­tude on board as compared to their larger counterparts. They need people who have the hunger and drive to work in an unstructured environment. Testing for these traits correctly therefore becomes very critical. 

One way to do that is to assess basic behaviourial competencies such as team management, communication and leader­ship skills after the candidates have been through the usual technical rounds. Way To The Top (WTTT), Sethi’s new venture offers companies a panel of 12 expert com­petency assessors who help recruiters in two ways—first, by identifying the different competencies required for a specific role, and mapping it to the job profile and second, taking and assessing one to five hour long competency based interviews.

“Competency-based interviewing (CBI) is like peeling an onion,” Sethi says. “An interviewer will keep peeling the layers until she gets to know what she wants.” Like any other interview, a CBI may begin with a general question such as—tell us about a situation where you lead a team. But then the experts would funnel it down with related questions such as—How did you lead the team? How did you build a rap­port with others? What was their response? A simple CBI assessment by WTTT could cost about Rs.2 lakh for a group of 20 people, which comes to Rs.2,000 per person, a viable investment to make when hiring senior or mid-level members in key positions. 

However, an alternative or a precursor to spending hours grilling candidates could be a multiple choice question competency test that can be taken by a potential candi­date online. Since SMEs are quite depen­dent on networks and referrals for recruiting people, it would be a worthwhile investment to use these online tests as a pre-screening tool to assess a candidate’s managerial competencies such as client management, client centricity, risk taking ability, decisiveness etc. 

Aspiring Minds, a Gurgaon-based hir­ing assessment firm provides such Situation Judgement Tests (see box above) online. “SMEs don’t have as much time or resources to interview potential candidates as larger companies do,” says co-founder and COO Varun Aggarwal. “They look for more automated solutions.” As the name suggests, these Situation Judgement Tests consist of different realistic situations a manager is likely to face while running the business and assessments are based on the candidate’s responses to these situations. 

For instance, a situation such as the following—there is a person in your team who has a lot of work on her hands and is there­fore avoiding taking up any more work. Sometimes, she even passes on the work to another person in the team. The others don’t know what’s going on and this person doesn’t know how to reduce her workload. What will you do?—may be provided along will be four possible options on how to resolve the situation. The candidate has to select the best and worst courses of action from the four given choices. Their answers are then evaluated on the basis of data on how high performing managers respond to these questions. 

Finally, there are certain roles in an organisation that require very specific skills and when a company posts an opening on a job portal for such roles, some 100 to 200 almost-identical resumes bombard its inbox. In such situations, it’s difficult for HR managers to shortlist a select few for personal interviews. 

A Bangalore-based firm Get2Galaxy provides gaming tests for eliminating unsuitable candidates in the first step. For instance, if a company is looking to hire quality control managers, it typically wants people with a good eye for detail and the ability to see through things. “These skills cannot be adequately judged on a simple aptitude test based on logical reasoning,” Subramanyam Kasibhat, founder of Get­2Galaxy explains. “We deploy online games to judge certain specific parameters required by different job profiles.” 

Competency-based interviewing (CBI) is like peeling an onion. An interviewer will keep peeling the layers until she gets to know what she wants." - Sarjeev Sethi

So one game from the G2G camp that tests for detail-orientedness is quite similar to the children’s popular puzzle of spotting the difference between two identical-seem­ing images, albeit with different levels of complexity to be completed within a given period of time. 

Another game used by companies wanting to assess candidates for design skills that typically require a good sense of geometric thinking or how a person visual­ises objects and dimensions is the maze game. This game requires an 8x8 virtual maze to be solved in 300 seconds and can­didates are judged on how they manoeuvre through the different geometric hurdles without breaking the rules of the game.These gaming assessments could cost a company $100 for 1,000 candidates per assessment. 

So stop relying on plain vanilla tech­niques of hiring that begin with a resume round, followed by a technical interview and end with an HR interview. Instead, try scop­ing out more refined and targeted tests for each role in your organisation.