Interviews have always been and continue to be a touchstone or a barometer of determining the worth of job candidates. It is a standard practice for employers to sit down with their prospective employees and evaluate their application for a post but most of the time, face-to-face interviews say very little about a candidate’s potential to succeed, ability to work within a team, versatility or interpersonal factors. There are multiple non-traditional assessment designs that the employers can customize to evaluate certain aspects of a job candidate or a candidate group. Listed below are five common alternatives to interviews that can help earn the right candidates whether they’re for a corporate role or a temporary gig.
1. Test Projects
Test projects are one of the most applicable ways to test a candidate’s ability to perform a particular task. They accurately reflect how the candidates will calibrate to specific work environments, responsibilities and problems. Web designer candidates can be asked to build a sample website for the company use. A chef can be asked to prepare a dish and a creative director to direct a short video.
Test projects, however, are less standardized than personal interviews and are not recommended for mass recruitments since it is usually very costly and time-consuming to assign test projects to numerous candidates and assess them accordingly. Recruiters should also be aware that test projects need to be relevant and aligned with the candidate’s capacity. For example, a sample website as a test project for a UX designer should not be expected to be very aesthetic or artistic since it can be normal for UX designers not to be familiar with creative layout and design principles.
2. Portfolio-based Assessment
A sit-down conversation with a candidate wouldn’t reflect much about his scope of experiences for the role he’s applying for especially within certain industries like journalism, graphic design or architecture where the candidate’s technical expertise within his or her field does not reveal significantly through a chat. But their portfolios do; a journalist’s articles or video reports can tell much about how well she can write, present or speak; posters and photographs of a graphic designer show his creative juice and mastery of design softwares; and the drawings of an architect shed some light on his sense of art and engineering.
Portfolios also allow the recruiters to trace the past relationship of the candidates with their previous jobs or companies. This further enables the recruiters to see what kind of values or insights from other companies the candidates can add to their own company. For example, if the candidate had been in a position in another company that your company models after or rivals with, you can expect that the candidate might be able to bring some intellectual resources from your competitor to yours, which your company can benefit from.
That said, this kind of information leakage is not usually a legally or morally acceptable act in a lot of countries although in countries like Myanmar where the rules and regulations on intellectual property are loose and plagiarism is an offence without severe legal repercussions, insider information transfer through moving employees is still a concern.
3. Assessment Centers
Assessment centers are apparently a better option than individual interviews to test out the candidates’ critical thinking abilities, attitude and aptitude within a team, communication skills and leadership capacity. Assessment centers usually require the candidates to work together to study a particular case, solve a dilemma or put forward an initiative while a panel of assessors observe and evaluate them based on the hard and soft skills they reflect during the simulation.
Assessment centers are usually designed based on the common tasks, problems and other circumstances that the job entails so that the employers can predict the potential of the candidates’ success in the company. Since assessment centers are tailored to see which candidates can take charge and stand out, good communication is usually a trait that can win over others and score the job. Assessment centers can usually be a challenge for Burmese millennials because they’re not wired to differentiating themselves within a team or in a competitive conversation due to their nature of politeness and modesty as well as the concern of disrespecting other people.
However, assessment centers are a good way to challenge the job candidates and see how many of them glow better than the rest. Additionally, employers are always encouraged to prepare cases or scenarios based on circumstances their employees may typically encounter at the company so at the end of the assessment, the employers not only know who to recruit, they also can conveniently mark down some insightful points covered during the discussion that can be applied to drive the company further.
4. Job Shadowing
Job shadowing is a more common assessment technique used for internal recruitments, internal transfers, promotions, job rotations and successor planning. This technique allows the internal candidates to shadow a person they’re succeeding or replacing; the job shadowers might receive mentorship or coaching by those they’re shadowing through observing the way they think, speak and execute. After a certain period of shadowing, the candidate may be separately assessed by a superior to see whether he or she is now adequately equipped for the role. Job shadowing is a highly effective alternative to passive training methods because the candidates have an opportunity to learn from immediate professionals and engage in up-close interaction with them.
Job shadowing can be the least stressful and competitive of all candidate assessment formats because the communication that takes place between the candidate and the person he’s shadowing is usually only for learning purposes and the competition for an internal role can be less fierce than a fresh application to a publicly open post. Job shadowing can be very similar to internships since both involve extensive interaction with higher professionals and both allow much room for learning first before working. In Myanmar, job shadowing can be a smooth and effortless practice because the majority of Burmese people are eager to learn, open to constructive criticism and thirsty for an experiential learning.
5. Psychometric Assessments
Tests designed to tap into a person’s psychology and generate results that are usually scientifically valid are used by a lot of employers to determine the personality or behavioral tendency of their future employees. These tests are usually inexpensive, quick and easy to use and the results can be of much help by allowing HR practitioners to identify their candidates’ traits, personalities or team roles, making it more convenient to determine which functions or departments they should be allocated into. In Myanmar, such psychometric tests are still low in popularity but a lot of employers have started to integrate these into job interviews to make more scientifically backed decisions in human resources management and development.
An example of such a test is MBTI which is a widely used personality assessment tool that translates the test takers’ input responses into personality groupings with a high numerical accuracy while Belbin is a team role allocation test that can interpret people’s personalities and categorize them into nine different team roles. Both MBTI and Belbin are examples of psychometric tests that are easily to use, relevant for corporate personas and directly applicable in almost every professional industry. MBTI and Belbin might especially be useful as standard personality assessment tools in Myanmar because Burmese millennials usually enjoy evaluating themselves through such self-analytical questionnaires and observing the test results which allow them to be more aware of their strengths and improvement areas. This is also a good opportunity for employers to come up with training and development plans synchronized with the needs of their employees.