How to Use Skill-Based Assessments for Effective Hiring Decisions

The episode breaks down how skill-based assessments can help make better hiring decisions, whether you’re hiring for an entry-level analyst, a digital marketing specialist, or a software engineer. Emily Sander shares real-life examples like using SEO quizzes, press release writing tasks, and real client scenarios to test candidates’ technical abilities. The advice is to create assessments that match the actual job and adjust them for the level of the role, especially if you’re a Chief of Staff leading the process.

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Who Am I?
If we haven’t met before - Hi👋 I’m Emily, Chief of Staff turned Executive Leadership Coach. After a thrilling ride up the corporate ladder, I’m focusing on what I love - working with people to realize their professional and personal goals. Through my videos here on this channel, books, podcast guest spots, and newsletter, I share new ideas and practical and tactical tools to help you be more productive and build the career and life you want.

Time Stamps:
00:25 Why Skill Assessments Matter

01:04 Hiring as Chief of Staff

01:31 Two Assessment Principles

02:45 Digital Marketing Hiring Story

04:12 Quizzes Plus Real Scenarios

07:02 Comms Tests and AI Concerns

08:41 Engineering Whiteboard Pressure

10:40 Assessing Senior Leaders

14:00 Be Selective and Trust Process

Transcript

0:06

Welcome back to Leveraging Leadership, where we unpack the art of business leadership. I'm your host, Emily Sander, chief of staff to an executive leadership coach. This show is all about finding your points of greatest influence and leveraging them to better serve those around you. One valuable and often overlooked element of the interview process are skill-based assessments or skill-based quizzes, and this is where you've gotten past the initial rounds of interview. And this candidate seems to be a pretty good fit, a pretty good culture fit with the company, with the team, but there are hard skills associated with this role, and I kind of wanna make sure they can do the hard skills, the technical skills,'cause they have to have both in order to be successful in this role. So this is the part of recruiting and hiring I wanna talk about today, recruiting and hiring. Broad topic. Just to zoom out for a quick second. Chiefs of staff are gonna be involved directly, indirectly with recruiting and hiring decisions. They are very likely going to be running point on a lot of the interview processes for C-suite executives, senior executives, other people across the company. I would spend a lot of time here. I would be very selective. It's one of the most important things you can do. That's my high level recap, summary for recruiting and hiring in general, and then going back down, zooming back in to this specific piece of it. I would say the two principles of the skill-based assessment would be one, to create that assessment. As close to the actual work that they'll be doing. So make the, make the quiz, make the assessment as close to the actual job and as close to the actual day-to-day problems they'll have to be solving or just issues, they'll have to be approaching as you can. So make that as one for one as possible or as close as possible. The second principle is, as you. Move up in the company. As you move up in roles, the recruiting and hiring process looks different, and therefore the assessment, the skill-based assessment should look different as well. So saying that another way is if you're interviewing for an entry-level analyst, you entire interview loop is going to look different than when you're hiring for a chief operating officer. Similarly, the skill-based assessment for an entry-level analyst. Is going to look a lot different than for a chief operating officer. You feel me? Okay. So that's, those are the two kind of guiding principles around this. Let's talk about some examples. So when I was chief of staff, one of the things I did was run the digital marketing arm of our business for about 18 months. I was dual hatted as chief of staff and um, head of the digital marketing arm. We had SEO analysts and PPC managers and social media managers and the like. And so part of the hiring was, hey, like do you get along with the team members? And I had them, you know, meet with me and meet with another team member and perhaps speak with someone else in the company just to make sure we had good fit. But part of that interview process was, hey. Do you know the main tenets of SEO? Are you on top of the latest trends with SEO?'cause it's constantly changing. Can you run a, can you run a paid ad campaign? Can you run it on LinkedIn? Can you run it on Facebook? Can you run it on all these different platforms? Uh, social media, same thing. All these different hard technical skills that you have to be able to do along with being a good team member and being able to communicate with clients in some cases. and after some trial and error kind of misfires where it's like, ooh, uh, they are great people. They're super friendly and a, and a great team member, but they don't know anything about digital marketing and to the point where. Uh, either their knowledge level was so low and like we tried to train him and tried to give him on the job training. It just, it just wouldn't work out or they were unable to, to learn new things. Basically we said we gotta have like at least a bar of technical hard knowledge coming into these roles. So there are a couple ways we did this. Number one is we found a at SEO quiz, and there was a, there was a company, I forget the name of, but they had a whole bunch of these, um, these types of recruiting and hiring assessments, skill-based assessments, and some of them were in digital marketing. To be clear, they weren't the greatest quizzes. Okay. They weren't like the most accurate per se. They weren't, um, they weren't the most comprehensive, certainly they were about 25 questions that ranged from foundational to like medium to advanced, like pretty hard, medium to advanced. And basically I used it as a baseline and a point of comparison. So I remember, uh, I had, I had, uh, our entire team take this quiz and I could kind of tell my, my top performers who scored the highest and all those things, which was great, but I got a range there and I got, okay, so Dan is like the highest on my team. He got this score, it's the highest on the team, which reflects his performance. All right, here's kind of the, the minimum or the bottom level on my team, and here's like the general range, general average that most people are in. Okay, got it. Um, and I remember people complaining like, this quiz doesn't do this and this quiz doesn't. I was like, I, I get it, I get it, I get it. I need, I need an apples to apples comparison for this part of the interview, interview process. Uh, and they actually, the team came to like that'cause they would often ask, I've spoken with this candidate, but what was their quiz score? I'm like, mm-hmm. You like that quiz now, don't you? So we had the quiz portion, which like again. The quiz itself didn't light the world on fire, but it was a point of comparison. And then we also had some real life scenarios our team members were running into with actual clients, and they would strip out any of the identifiable data for clients, but they would say, Hey, if you had a situation. Like this where let's say, um, you know, the, the goal for the paid ads for this client is A, B, C, and their budget is X, Y, Z and you've got this platform, that platform and that platform. What is your strategy? And here's kind of the, the puts and takes in different contexts for that. How would you approach that? What questions would you ask? So we had a little bit of, a little bit of more open-ended discussion or open-ended questions as well. And those, those were really good because it was literally, here is an actual client. Situation. And I remember, uh, one, uh, Holly, one of our, uh, team members was like, ask them this because I actually have a call where I, I'm not sure how to approach this. Like, ask any candidates coming in like, today, tomorrow, this, and we did, and we sent back the results and she's like, I'm using that, I'm using that one. That was really good. And I was like, that candidate is going to the next round. So that was, uh, a certain way. We built in skill-based assessments, or in this case, S-E-O-P-P-C, quizzes for digital marketing. Okay. That's an example. It could be, um, I was, I was talking to someone who was hiring someone for communication, so that's fairly straightforward as well. Here's a press release that we're going to do, and here's the information, you know, who's gonna be quoted and their quotes and their titles, and it's a, it's a product launch and an acquisition dah, dah, dah. Can you write this? You know, write a, write a press release here. This gets a little trickier now with ai. So there's ways to kind of see if something's been written by AI or if someone can actually do it. There's ways of presenting a, a scenario where, talk me through if you know we're getting a new. CEO or a new president. And that's a big deal to a lot of people and you're gonna have to do a communication strategy to help with this navigating change. Talk me through how you would put that communication strategy together, and then can you actually just draft, like even right here, can you actually just draft the, the email that would go out announcing this thing initially? And there's different ways to do that. You can do it like in real time, so you can watch'em or just have a timed, um, piece where they can give you an outline or a draft. But if you actually need them to be fingers on keyboards writing that type of communication, have them do it. And it could be, you know, hey, We, we just went through bringing on a new CEO. Our communication strategy wasn't strong. We, we found that we kind of fell down in different areas and people got really, really upset by not knowing about it, by not having time to process it, by not being able to ask questions. So any real life scenario you can incorporate into the skill-based assessment for the interview loop is good. other examples would be, I remember, um. I was not on point for this interview, but I was one of the Fit Loops. So like, Hey, is it, is it, is it a good general fit for the company and team? Emily, can you just kind of give us your thoughts on this? But it was for a software engineer for like coder, like hardcore engineer who like did coding and I remember the engineering team, like put these poor people in a room with a whiteboard and gave them. Like a coding problem or whatever that was impossible to solve. They gave it like, it was basically like a math problem. That's impossible. They know that's impossible. They're like, stand up there in front of all, you know, four of us just staring at you and like, have you solve this problem. And of course they would like, oh, this doesn't like, hold on the sense, it makes sense. It doesn't make sense. And they would fumble through it and the engineering team wanted to see one. Could they catch? There was a problem'cause it was kind of built where if you didn't look at it closely, you wouldn't know there was a problem and you would just kinda go, okay, is this, this, this, this? There you go, ta-da. It's like, no, no, no, no. You missed. You missed, this is actually like this. It's tilted like this. So they would look for, did you catch it at all? And they would look for what happened when you got flustered? Basically like, could you problem solve? Like how, talk me through what you're thinking about. Talk me through what's taking you so long? And I would walk by this conference room, there was a big window and I would just see these poor candidates just like turning red or sweating or fidgeting or whatever. And it was just, it was part of. Part of their interview process. And, uh, some of them would say like, this is actually impossible, solve for this reason. And they'd be like, okay, engineering team. Like, okay. So there's, there's ones like that, um, like, like skills like accounting or like technical skills coding. Um, anything like that is relatively straightforward to vet for. So I would literally build in a real world problem or something that is coming up. Will will be coming up for anyone coming into this role or has come up, and I would just use those to build your skill-based assessments. Let's see. If you're hiring for high level folks who are, like, they're not doing hands on keyboard stuff. They're making decisions, they're, uh, solving personnel issues. They are dealing with a partnership program and building that from scratch or overhauling that if they are rebranding or whatever it is. So you can talk about some of those less. Hard and fast, like, here's how you do accounting correctly. Here's how you are Penny perfect and balance the books. Here's how you do the gap reporting, et cetera, et cetera. I would still try to. Mirror real life scenarios and, talk them through, have them talk through something. So in one interview loop, I remember, and someone else was running point on this, but this was for, uh, like an SVPI think, or like kind of, um. I think they came in as SVP and it was kind of like, Hey, if you do well, you're gonna have a track to a C-suite position in that same functional area. But anyway, this was, this was a lengthy process and no one was in a hurry and the candidate was in a hurry. The candidate wanted to vet us very closely as well, which is totally valid and totally fair. And so the person running Point talked to the internal group doing the interview loop and said, Hey, um, I'm thinking about giving them a real life. Internal kind of scenario we're working with. I wanna be careful and, and cognizant and considerate of the people involved. But if this person gets this role, they're gonna have to be involved in this thing and take point on, on problem solving it. And so we basically said, okay, here's how we would describe that. We're not gonna use names, we're not gonna use too many specifics, but enough specifics where they have some traction and, and a real life scenario to work with. And so we actually presented this. To them in a somewhat sanitized way just for protecting people, but also for like, here's like a real life scenario. And we talked them through that and, and through the rounds of discussion over the weeks and over the months, it was this ongoing thing and they would, they were attuned to it and they would. give us their recommendations or give us, here's how I would think about it, or here's some questions I have when I was like, oh, those are good questions. We haven't asked those. Let's ask those questions. And then we would provide this candidate updates of like, here's the conversation, here's what happened. Here's, um, the legal pieces and the compensation pieces, and all these different things. And so they were kind of going through that with us in real time, And that gave us a really good. Glimpse and really good experience of like, okay, this is how it would be to actually work with this person on things like this. And um, this person ended up getting hired and we ended up, uh, they did the tail end of this, uh, this personnel, this, this process, this internal process. They did the tail end and they were able to pretty much step right in.'cause they had had all the context and they were kind of involved in it, so to speak, for the weeks and months proceeding. So those were some examples of some skill-based assessments that you can and should run in the interview loop. And again, the two principles guiding the assessments are make it as close to real life work as you can, and then tailor it to, for the type of role, the level of role that you're interviewing for. And then just to do the reminder, zoom out big picture for recruiting and hiring. Take your time. Be selective. Listen to the, the, the look. Look at the hard skills and look at the stuff. Empirical and black and white. Do that. Also, listen to your intuition. If someone doesn't pass the gut check. Or there's like a little spidey sense, like, uh, they look really good on paper, but something is off. Listen, be very selective if you're on the fence, especially for a higher level role. Go seek counsel. Go like, Hey, so and so internally, can you, can you talk to this candidate? I know they're not in your functional group, but I really appreciate your input and perspective. Can you just, can you just talk to him? Be very selective. Some of the worst tires I've made, like the worst tires were when I was under pressure to get someone in. And I got to a point where I was like, okay, like your name and what do you want for for compensation? Okay. And you're human and you have a pulse and you're a warm body. Get in here. And those turned out to be some of the worst tires ever. So even, and especially when you're under pressure, and especially when it's a key role, we have to have someone in this role. Take your time, be selective. Make them go through the steps. Give them information as they go along. So it's a two-way street, and you're feeding them information to give them a sense of, is this role right for you? But do that, run that process. Run the process, and be able to trust the process. And a big part of being able to trust that process is to build this skill-based assessment portion into that process. All right, and I'll catch you next week on leveraging Leadership. This episode is brought to you by Next Level Coaching. If you or anyone you know would like to learn more about executive leadership coaching, please visit www.next level Coach.