Advantages of computer-based testing to establish the candidate’s domain expertise

Gone is the era of written tests or interviews to assess the knowledge and skill of an ambitious candidate, who wishes to join a company. Computer-based tests are the “in-thing” now. According to studies, the recruiters prefer a wide range of assessment methods to know the competencies of the candidate before the day of joining. The trend shows that the majority of the organizations are now moving towards advanced computer tests to determine the domain expertise of the candidate.

Currently, there are three types of computer tests - computer-based test, computer-assisted test and computer-adaptive test. The computer-based test is a simple replacement of paper-pen test to a computer screen. In the computer-assisted test, the paper evaluation is done by computer, for example, an OMR sheet-based evaluation. The computer-adaptive test is done on the computer and questions get simpler or harder based on the performance of the candidate for the previous question. The computer-adaptive test is becoming more popular as many institutions and organizations are incorporating this in their testing and assessment process. Industry-specific/domain-centric computer tests are also available, which assess the expertise for a job role in a particular industry or domain.

Generally, computer tests unlock a lot of opportunities as this the most beneficial in terms of cost and efforts. It eases many testing administrations in one go by enabling the real-time feedback to both candidate and invigilators. Ability-based assessment, greater insights into the weakness/strength of the candidate, and the real-time feedback are some of the characteristics of the computer tests. Moreover, this kind of tests is suitable for largescale examinations since the system provides personalized questions based on the capacity of each candidate.

Domain assessment

As the industry is growing, the job profile is also widening. New and specialized roles are emerging day-by-day. Finding the right candidate for each of these positions are the biggest challenge for the organizations. Including domain-based assessments in the hiring process is the best solution for this purpose.

Domain-based tests mainly assess the candidate's knowledge and competencies in that particular domain. This assessment enables recruiters to measure the industry-demand skills of the candidates along with communication and cognitive skills. By this, the employer would get a clear idea about the strength and weakness of the candidates in their respective domain well before they enter the organization. Therefore, the employer can assign responsibilities accordingly. Furthermore, this assessment also helps the organization to track the competencies of existing staff and make sure whether they are on par with the industry benchmarks. Based on the insights, the employer can devise a training plan to upskill the employees, if required.

India's leading testing and assessment company, MeritTrac, has developed domain-based assessment solutions to suit a wide variety of job roles. This includes testing software engineers, programmers, SEO professionals, sales professionals, and general office skills - MS Word; as per the job requirements. Recruiters can evaluate the expertise of job seekers with the expert-curated questions provided in these domain-based assessments. The questions are presented in the form of multiple-choice, multiple answers, and project-based coding scenarios that are customizable. CodeTrac, another solution from MeritTrac, enables employers to test the capabilities of the programmers through real-time online testing.

All these underline that the domain-based assessment is the need of the hour to hire the right talents for ever-evolving specialized job roles. Organizations should embrace this while recruiting job-ready talents.