Bringing remote work into the mix of your existing winning team can change things a lot. You can’t rely on water cooler chats or spontaneous team lunches to bond or spot personality quirks.
The “gut feeling” you’d get about someone from daily face time? That’s a lot harder to find over Zoom calls.
So what measures can you take to ensure you bring in the people who click with your team and keep your remote work culture thriving—all while being extremely skilled at what they do? Easy. You can do it with the help of behavioural assessments.
These assessments have become the secret weapon in modern remote team management, helping you see the person behind the paper resume.
Understand Your Candidates Beyond the Resume
When you’re sorting through the resumes, almost all candidates just seem like individuals with a specific set of skills. In short, everything looks good on paper.
The problem arises in the daily operations. Although there are certain characteristics you can evaluate either in the in-person interviews or during the probation period. For instance, you can evaluate how someone responds in meetings, how they handle stress, or maybe just notice it with small talks in the kitchen. But remote work is different altogether.
If someone isn’t naturally self-motivated or comfortable communicating online, it can really show. Or sometimes, it doesn’t show at all until it’s a real problem affecting work.
That’s why it’s important to dig a little deeper and look for the right traits in your candidates like:
- Self-discipline
- Proactive communication
- Adaptability
- Team spirit
- Virtual problem-solving
Employee Assessment Tools—What Are They, Really?
Today’s employee assessment tools are carefully designed to show how someone is likely to respond to work situations. These may include: cognitive ability tests, personality assessment, situational judgement tests (SJTs), skill-based tests, or emotional intelligence (EI) assessments.
These workplace behavior tests make it easier for you to understand how your candidates operate. For instance:
- How does someone deal with pressure or last-minute changes?
- Do they thrive on individual projects or love team settings?
- What’s their feedback style—direct and to the point, or more laidback?
When you’re using these tools, hiring becomes less of a “fingers crossed” situation and more of a smart, insight-driven decision.
Why Do You Need Remote Assessment Tools
To build your remote company culture the right way.
Remote company culture isn’t merely about quirky backgrounds on video calls or Friday happy hours. It’s built on something far deeper than that. For instance, open communication, mutual trust, respect, and shared value.
The online assessments help you identify the people who can strengthen this company culture of yours and who cannot. The traits you need to look for include:
- Collaboration Champs – those who naturally include and elevate others.
- Transparency Stars – teammates who can communicate openly and take ownership.
- Mood Boosters – all individuals that can bring steady, positive energy when challenges arise.
When you hire keeping culture in mind, you’re playing the long-term game. New joiners feel like they fit in. The retention rate goes up. Your team keeps raising the bar for collaboration and team work even while working from home.
How to Use Behavioural Assessments in Your Hiring
Using behavioural assessments doesn’t have to be complex or intimidating. Here’s a step by step process for you to get started with it.
Step 1: Start with a clear understanding of which type of candidate you need for the role you’re interviewing for.
- Someone who can work under pressure?
- Someone who can collaborate with the team virtually and get things done?
- Someone who has ownership and can drive results independently?
Step 2: Explore which type of assessments would you want to integrate into your system. For instance,
- Multiple choice question assessment to understand their choices of answers in different scenarios.
- Rating scales for questions to enable your candidates to select a number to represent their answers for various situations.
- Inserting an adjective to describe a situation
- Open ended questions to explain their point of view or solutions for handling a challenge.
Step 3: Make sure that your focus remains on scientifically validated questions with real-world scenarios. This is important to gauge your candidate’s temperament, emotional intelligence, work style, and team compatibility. For instance,
- What’s your preferred way of prioritizing work when multiple urgent tasks land at once?
- Describe a situation where you had to handle conflict between teammates and your approach to solving it.
Making Hiring More Human—Even Through a Screen
Here’s the truth: no company is just a logo and a bunch of emails. It’s a mix of people, who can be messy, quirky, or brilliant. behavioural assessments can actually help you know each team member of yours even if that’s across different time zones.
With the addition of behavioural evaluations to your hiring strategy, you can make more informed decisions, reduce attrition, and build stronger, more cohesive teams. At the end of day, justifying the cost of wrong-hires is something no one wants to do. To ensure you do it fast and right, use technology for your response e-assessments.
Get Started with MeritTrac’s Behavioural Assessment Test.
