5 Candidate Selection Tools to Speed up Your Hiring Process

With remote work becoming the new normal for a lot of companies, there is one imminent change happening. Since they’re no longer tied to the location of your business, candidates from all over the world are (hopefully) applying to your open positions. While you initially might have been excited by this increase in volume (more candidates = more good quality candidates!), you might have also quickly realized that this spells exponentially more candidate selection work for you.

Don’t worry, we got your back. To help you make fast but effective hiring decisions, we gathered our favorite candidate selection tools, designed to make your hiring process sleeker and more efficient. Let’s get into it!

1. Toggl Hire

One of the biggest candidate selection mistakes you can make is relying on the candidate’s resume alone as a legitimate sign that they can get the job done well. Resumes are outdated and ineffective in predicting success on the job. This is why we created Toggl Hire, so that companies can be confident they’re hiring the best-qualified person for the job, instead of the one with the most impressive resume.

Toggl Hire‘s Smart Test lets you create skills tests for your open positions in just two clicks. You can create skills tests for positions in development, marketing, sales, and customer support, and include soft skills in the mix as well. These tests consist of a range of questions that can be multiple-choice or open-ended. Once the candidate finishes their test, you immediately get their results and can filter applicants by score to create your shortlist of the top talent in minutes. Plus, candidates love the experience – Toggl Hire boasts a 91% candidate satisfaction rating.

Toggl Hire makes the initial step of the candidate selection super easy. The test filters out the unsuitable candidates instantly, meaning you’re left with a list of only the very best talent. 

Pricing: Free plan available, paid plans start at $99/month.

2. Plum

Candidate selection is not just about skills. Besides testing for the right skill set for a position, you also need to test for the right soft skills and mindset. This way, you can predict a candidate’s success in their new role and save money on turnover that can happen because of poor fit from the start.

Plum does this by making you create a Match Criteria Survey before you advertise any open role. In this survey, you define the critical needs for a given role based on criteria such as communication, innovation, adaptability, and many others. Prospective candidates then take Plum’s Discovery Survey to match their personality skills against your requirements.

Once you hire your best candidate, you’ll be able to use their test results to let them grow in their roles. Plum’s Talent Grow Guides use candidate scores to develop a personalized development roadmap for every employee that you hire.

Pricing: not available publicly – enquire with the company to get a quote.

3. SparkHire

With the coronavirus pandemic still going strong, many HR departments are realizing the full value of video calls for hiring purposes. While Zoom has been the go-to video communication tool for many HR professionals, others need a more specialized tool built specifically for hiring purposes and this is where SparkHire comes into play.

There are two ways that you can set up SparkHire – one-way or two-way video interviews.

With one-way video interviews, candidates get a SparkHire link where they can hop on a video call alone and answer your questions. These can be text- and video-based and you can limit the time that the candidate has to think about each question. Moreover, you can limit the number of takes for each question, as well as the maximum answer length.

Two-way video interviews are similar to a standard Zoom call. You can record your interviews, brand them with your company logos, and record them directly from your browser. The recorded interviews can be shared across your HR department and you can even get notified when someone from your team is watching.

Once you’ve collected a number of interviews, you can rate, tag, and comment on them. To make things easier, you can send rejection emails directly from the app so your email deliverability is on point as well.

Pricing: starting at $119 per month for unlimited interviews with one job at a time.

4. AllyO

In today’s job climate, finding great talent can be incredibly difficult, which is why it’s important to be where the candidates are. The creators of AllyO created this app with this very purpose. You can use it to connect with applicants through website live chat, SMS, or email.

One thing to note about AllyO is that you can deploy it on any page you want and candidates can leave their application on one platform and pick it up somewhere else. It lets candidates apply by using a conversational AI chatbot that asks candidates questions about themselves and their qualifications.

By analyzing the candidates’ answers, AllyO helps you identify great performers ahead of time. The app can be used in several different languages and besides striking up conversations and selecting candidates, you can also use it to schedule interviews with the best ones directly from the app.

Pricing: not available publicly – enquire with the company to get a quote.

5. CodinGame

If you’ve ever had to hire a developer or another technical role without having any knowledge about development yourself, you know the struggle. CodinGame is one of the oldest pre-employment assessment platforms out there, catered specifically to businesses looking to hire developers.

You can pick one of the pre-built assessment tests for your preferred language and scenario. If you want to make your own test, you can do so from scratch or by grabbing one of the questions from their library. Send out the test through your preferred medium and watch as results come in.

CodinGame goes one step further by offering you to choose developers and other tech talents from their own network. According to the platform owners, there are over 2 million developers that take tests in over 26 different languages. Apparently, you can just create a job ad with your requirements and the platform will notify you as soon as matches start coming in.

Once you have a good fit, you can chat with the best candidate directly from the platform, without going to email.

Pricing: free trial is available, paid plans start at 249EUR/month for unlimited tests and candidates

Wrapping up

As you can see, there are lots of different ways to tackle candidate selection and lots of different tools that can help you out. Whichever tool you choose, make sure that it’s catered to your specific company and opening. One thing that we do know is that Toggl Hire has a considerable list of happy customers that love our candidate selection process. If you want to ensure that you get the candidate that knows how to get the job done, give us a try and sign up today.