Our goal at HackerRank is to help companies optimize their hiring process. Over the years, we have learned that the best approach for helping our customers is to surface the right insights into their own data.
When I think about complex work like tech hiring, I find myself coming back to this quote: “In absence of clearly defined goals, we become strangely loyal to performing daily acts of trivia” (Robert Heinlein). Without clear goals—and in turn, clear data—how can we gauge the impact of our actions?
As the art of hiring becomes increasingly challenging, teams need more granular data to understand the impact of their efforts and compete for the best talent. Now, for the first time, recruiters and hiring managers have detailed visibility into the efficacy of their efforts via the HackerRank Test Health Dashboard.
Building effective skills assessments
Our world-class Customer Success team has worked with recruiters and hiring managers across the globe to optimize thousands of technical skills assessments. Through this partnership, we discovered that effective skills assessments can be traced back to two key dimensions:
The first is the ability to effectively attract talent. Are your candidates responding to your test invitation at all? Do candidates open your email and attempt the test?
The second consideration is the strength of your assessments. How well are your tests actually designed? Does the test match the candidate’s skills and effectively seek out the best individuals for a given role?
The HackerRank Test Health Dashboard offers insight into these dimensions at an individual assessment level, helping to dramatically improve your hiring process. With this dashboard, HackerRank customers can now understand their hiring performance funnel all the way from a test invite being sent, through to candidate hiring for every test.*
*Requires supported integration with applicable ATS platform.
Digging deeper on Test Health Dashboard metrics
To measure assessment performance against those 2 key dimensions, we partnered with customers to develop 2 new metrics: Candidate Response Score and Assessment Quality Score.
We analyzed our database of 150 million assessment and candidate data points to quantify the qualities of an effective assessment. Through our database, we’re able to compare and benchmark each individual assessment against all others taken on our platform.
Here’s how we measure success for each assessment:
Candidate Response Score (CRS) considers delivery rates, email opens, test link clicks, and attempt rates. This score will help you understand the success of your messaging or talent branding.
Assessment Quality Score (AQS) considers candidate feedback on a test, attempt duration, participation rate, completion rate, and more. This score should help you see the success rate of your assessments and opportunities to restructure your tests in the best way.
By evaluating performance against our dataset, we’re able to assign a CRS and AQS score to each individual test. We also break down performance against factors that contribute to each metric.
Using the Test Health Dashboard on your tests
The insights provided by the Test Health Dashboard help you narrow down areas of improvement, experiment to push boundaries, and delight your candidates with a high quality, thoughtful experience.
Define areas of improvement:
View test completion time, analyze feedback, and evaluate assessment difficulty
Experiment:
Tweak messaging or use rich media to learn what resonates best with your candidates
Delight your candidates:
Review attempt rates and candidate feedback to design assessments with the appropriate difficulty level
Improve your tests today
Recruiting is a team effort and requires tight alignment between recruiters and hiring managers. With the Test Health Dashboard, you can boost internal alignment and work as a unified team to deliver the right experience and quality assessments to successfully hire the talent you’re seeking.
Oded Shekel is the SVP of Product Management at HackerRank. He has over 15 years of experience in the tech industry, including Intel, Microsoft, and Blackberry.