Leadership Skills Test 101 for Employers: Discovering Your Organization’s Future Leaders

Your success depends largely on your ability to build a strong team that will help you meet your growth goals. According to the Harvard Business Review, well-run organizations are over 40% more productive than their nearest competitors and have operating margins 30% to 50% higher than their peers.

Hiring the right people and placing them in the right jobs ensures top operational efficiency. Unfortunately, this is easier said than done—hiring top people has become challenging due to a worldwide talent shortage. The problem has become so critical that 71% of CEOs say a skills shortage is their biggest challenge for the foreseeable future.

Since hiring and retaining top talent has become so difficult, business leaders are looking for solutions. Many have decided that the best HR strategy is to deploy an assessment solution like the eSkill Talent Assessment Platform^TM and job tests like leadership skills tests to identify top talent.

What Are Leadership Skills Tests

Leadership skills tests help HR teams evaluate job applicants and current staff. They focus on soft skills, such as collaboration, problem resolution, conflict management, emotional intelligence, and the ability to motivate, instead of hard skills—abilities that pertain to tasks directly related to the job.

The best HR strategies recommend using leadership skills tests along with behavioral assessments to evaluate candidates thoroughly because behavioral assessments show whether a candidate is a good fit for a job and your corporate culture.

Best HR Strategy to Build a Strong Team

Leadership skills tests and behavioral assessments work in synergy to help you identify top candidates. These are some ways they help you improve recruiting.

• Simplify Applicant Screening: Do you receive hundreds of responses for each job posting? If you and your team review them manually, you will waste hours weeding out unqualified applicants. Leadership skills tests and behavioral assessments allow you to sort completed assessments, screen applicants at a glance, and rank them by score. A task that took hours now takes minutes, and you and your team have more time to focus on critical projects.

• Reduce Turnover: When you onboard a new employee, you probably wonder whether the person will stay with your company and if they will make a significant contribution. Both are legitimate concerns because many new employees do not work out. According to a BambooHR survey, almost 70% of new hires leave voluntarily or because they were terminated within the first three months. The best hiring strategies include leadership skills tests and behavioral assessments to help you recruit employees likely to stay with your organization.

• Minimize Unconscious Bias: In a perfect world, hiring managers judge candidates fairly and impartially. However, unconscious bias has a way of entering into even the best-managed hiring processes. In a recent Bright Talk survey, 79% of HR professionals admitted that unconscious bias influences many recruitment and succession planning decisions. The best hiring strategies minimize the risk of unconscious bias in hiring decisions because they focus on candidates’ skills and abilities instead of information on resumes and what was said during interviews.

Get A Comprehensive View of Candidates

Skills tests and behavioral assessments help you improve hiring outcomes when used alone. However, research shows that using leadership skills tests and behavioral assessments together increases the likelihood of placing the right person in the proper position by up to 80%. The following fictional scenario illustrates why the best hiring strategies recommend using both.

A fast-growing public agency was recruiting candidates to fill a lead engineer position. The office was casual, with a work-hard-play-hard environment and culture. Employees wore jeans, t-shirts, and shorts and were allowed to work flexible hours.

Ava, the HR manager, identified Felix as the top candidate because his scores on advanced Java programming and IT skills tests were among the highest of all the candidates assessed. His resume also indicated that he had experience leading software development teams. Isla, the VP of Engineering, was impressed and offered him the job.

It was soon apparent that Felix was a poor fit for the job. His experience was with large companies with a traditional top-down management culture. His leadership and management style were direct, and he demanded that his team members follow his orders without question. 

Although this had worked well in large organizations with a highly structured work environment, it was inappropriate in a small agency with a laid-back culture. After three months, Felix’s team requested a meeting with Isla and threatened to quit.

Felix’s skills test results showed he was the perfect hire. However, the assessment only evaluated his technical skills. If the hiring team had also asked him to complete a leadership skills test and behavioral assessment, the results would have shown that Felix was not the right person for the job, regardless of how good his skills were.

Get Started with Leadership Skills Tests

Many businesses are evaluating and implementing the best hiring strategies. For many, this has included adding leadership skills tests and behavioral assessments to their recruiting process. Do you want to learn how leadership skills tests can help you improve hiring across your organization? Contact us to request a demo.