Competency assessment tool
In every company, people are hired and given a position that matches their talents and skills. But how can you ensure that new hires are placed in the right position?
Simple. Use a competency assessment tool to determine an individual’s potential in key areas, and create a better employee profile. This profile can then be matched with a suitable position or used to map a personalized development plan.
Using a competency assessment tool ensures:
- Individuals are objectively analyze and profiled
- Identify potential competency gaps between an employee and their job profile
- Continous growth within the organization and set reasonable performance standards
What is a competency assessment?
In the most basic sense, a competency assessment, or competency evaluation, reveals a job candidate’s key skills, talents, and areas of weakness. And having this information puts you at a key advantage – you’re able to better fit an open position to a candidate – and ensure that they’ll be successful in their role. This means fewer resources will be spent on costly employee turnover, and you’ll have a more productive, happier workforce.
What’s included in the competency assessment template:
As seen in the assessment template sample shared above, it’s advised that any competency assessment tools you use should contain the following elements:
- Logical question series
- Numerical questions series
- Personality test
- Carefully designed question structure
- Clear assessment goals: what are the results going to be used for? Who is the test made for?
It is important that the employee encounters no practical barriers whatsoever while taking the test: Mobile devices such as a tablet or smartphone are ideally suited increasingly the device of choice when it comes to taking assessments or questionnaires. Our software is fully mobile optimized for smartphones and tablets and is guaranteed to provide a user-friendly experience. Competency assessments through paper forms, pdf or word documents is also possible but has the disadvantage that the data still needs to be transferred to a central system as a separate action, which is a tedious and error-prone task.
To get the most accurate, honest results, it’s important to reduce barriers to completion as much as you possibly can. Pointerpro software provides assessment templates and questionnaires that are already mobile-optimized for smartphones and tablets, so respondents can easily answer on their own device, at their own pace. We’ve designed these tools to be user-friendly, making our surveys and assessments simple to use, share and answer.
Of course, some companies still use paper forms, PDFs or Word documents for their competency assessments. While for many it’s a case of ‘that’s the way it’s always been done’, these methods aren’t without their own challenges – the most important being the need to transfer the collected data to a larger, central system as a separate action, which not only requires additional resources and analysis but can result in errors during data-entry.
Why use Pointerpro as your competency assessment tool?
Why use Pointerpro as your competency assessment tool?
Engaging email options
Deliver employee reviews directly to the right mailbox.
Multi-user management and collaboration
Smooth sailing guaranteed with functionalities such as user management and multiple administrators
Real-Time reporting
Send a personalized report with feedback on each respondent’s performance with our automated PDF generator.
Competency assessment versus performance evaluation
These terms are commonly used interchangeably. Though both of these are measures that a company can use to know whether or not a person fits the job they are doing, they actually look at different areas in order to provide the results needed by the company.
Here are a number of differences:
- A competency assessment deals with the ability of an employee to perform his or her task, while a performance evaluation is mainly focused on the work performance of an employee.
- It answers the question on what the attributes of an employee are that can help them do the job, while a performance evaluation answers the question on how a person specifically performs with regard to his or her job.
- A competency assessment focuses on key attributes a person has, while performance evaluation focuses on the job processes of an employee.
- It is more of evaluating the input that an employee already has while performance evaluation is the process of knowing the output that an employee can provide.
How to assess competency – and why it matters
Here are some specifics on why using an online assessment tool for competency assessments is a great idea for your business, and improves your existing HR processes:
- They improve recruitment efforts. Competency assessments are a great aid to HR when searching for new personnel because they provide an objective screening, analysis, and profiling process. This information can be put in an automatically generated PDF report at the end of the assessment. These reports can then be used to quickly identify the position that a candidate would be best suited for within the organization.
- Professional development needs. Employees can be analyzed and benchmarked against their job profile to determine where extra input and improvement is required. This data can be used to create personal development plans to help an individual’s career growth.
- Continuous development. Competency assessments also play a role in improving the general workflow and efficiency inside the organization. If clear objectives and standards are set around a certain competency or test score, they will act as an internal motivator and a goal for the employees to work towards. This, in turn, stimulates productivity, and ultimately, revenue.
- Increase in job satisfaction. As mentioned before, competency tests will enable the individual to recognize the talents they possess and inspire them to take their careers to the next level. Competency assessments will act as an internal motivator and lead to an increase in job satisfaction as the individual can track their personal improvements and enjoy professional growth as a direct result of their efforts.
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