Let's say you found an awesome job online. You really want to get an interview there so you give it your all. You make a new resume, you edit your awesome cover letter, you even freshen up your LinkedIn profile. Then you click apply and hope to hear back. But to your surprise, you do hear back, 30 seconds later with an email asking you to take a skill assessment test. "That mustn't be too important." You tell yourself. Your application was flawless with your new resume, cover letter and LinkedIn profile. So you take the test right away just to get rid of it, but then you get rejected. Why? In this video you'll learn why skill assessment tests determine if you get an interview and more importantly five steps on how to study for them to be sure to land and interview at this job you really want. Skill assessment tests are becoming the norm to assess candidates in first round interviews because it is super easy to claim you have certain skills and certain traits on your resume.
That's why companies wants to see if you truly possessed the required skills for the job you're applying to. The problem now is most companies decide whether to call you for an interview based on these skills assessment tests, but most candidates don't know they should study for them and most candidates don't know how to prepare them at all. I'm sure you, watching this video right now have the required skills to perform well in the job if you get hired, but if you don't study well, if you don't prepare the skill assessment tests, you won't get an interview. Therefore, let's make that not happen to you. Let's start again.
First, when you get the invitation to do the test, pause for a moment. You usually have a couple of days to do it. So take your time and start with step number one, unveil the skills. Know that HR managers won't send you a random test with questions they chose themselves based on their mood. Platforms such as vervoe, HackerRank, pymetrics, and many others make you input the skills and traits companies want in their candidates. Then an AI algorithm will take those requirements and match them with a deeply thought questionnaire that will be sent to you. So you know what you should do first. Search for these skills and traits HR manager's input. How? Look for them on Google. Simply write the name of the position you're applying for and then the skills or the name of position and then qualities or characteristics. Make sure you list everything you find and circle the elements you think you would need to work on a bit more.
Having a list of skills and traits on your mind is not enough. HR managers won't ask you to list them. Like I mentioned previously, an AI algorithm will transform those intangible skills and traits into questions to test them. For example, it's cool to say you're a great team player. Now they will test you with a specific question to see if it's true. Therefore, it's important for you to know how those skills translate into questions with step number two, find a secret questions. In other words, you have to find a questions they might ask you and then prepare them. You can head over to Glassdoor in the interview section, there you can find great clues about what questions this company asks. With a bit of look, you can even find people who share their experience with the skill assessment test.
If you find nothing on Glassdoor, a great way to find question examples is on Google again. Just type questions to test and then the name of the skill. For example, here's me typing questions to test teamwork and you see how many sites I can read from that are dedicated to HR managers in the first place. But what do you do now that you have all the questions. Just like in an exam, if you have the questions in advance but don't prepare the exam, you'll still get a bad grade, so that's why you need step number three, prepare a unique answers. You probably know many, many candidates will take the test with you and not many people know that, but you're not graded on a passing score. Meaning you'll not get at any of you because you hit a certain benchmark, let's say for example, 80% in the test. You are actually being compared to others. Yes. Look at the screen here.
The AI will rate your answers comparing you to other applicants. Then give feedback to HR managers who will take a final decision. What does it mean for you? Your answers have to be much, much better than your peers, but how do you do that? Most people don't know how to answer situational questions like this one. Usually throwing facts and stories here and there without any structure. When you have a situational questions like this one, make sure you use star method. For example, let's take back the question about leadership you've seen previously. How have you continued to develop your leadership skills further in the past few years? Let's start by explaining the situation. "In university, I was regularly participating in extracurricular activities such as playing soccer and reading new books for the book club I was involved in." Always start by establishing context to make the person reading your answer more knowledgeable about your situation.
Then explain your tasks. :In my soccer team. I was just involved in showing up for practices and games and giving my all and my responsibilities in the book club were making sure I read the book of the month as well as prepare a short essay on what I thought about it to discuss it in teams." Here you lay out the different tasks you were doing in the situation you previously explained. Again, this gives more context and information that will help the person reading your information, imagining as if they were with you. Now the important part, action. "I wanted to develop my leadership skills so I volunteered once to organize the soccer practices and come up with my own set of exercises for the team. I enjoyed this experience so much I decided to take more responsibilities in my book club as well, by proposing book ideas to read as well as new topics to discuss at the end of the month."
Here you explain exactly what steps did you take to start developing your leadership skills. This is the most important part because you start explaining the set of actions that made you a better leader. Finally, the results section. "As a result, I created stronger bonds within my soccer team. Players appreciated my efforts and I was nominated captain the following season. In my book club, I was no longer a casual member. I was invited to be part of the board of the book club. While there I kept on taking initiatives for the good of the group and propose new ideas to challenge everyone to step out of the comfort zone." In the last part you want to explain what was the impact of your previous actions, but don't stop there. Also explain how you're continuing to develop your leadership skills until today, always give an answer that gives a great forecast about your skill development.
This way your answer will be super complete and will help HR managers understand more precisely how you can contribute to the company. To be honest, preparing those behavioral and situational questions is not enough to stand out from your peers. Just because these skill assessment tests will have other types of questions and that's why you need step number four, prepare coding and video and interviews. Know that the ultimate goal of a skill assessment test is to make sure an HR manager hires based on merit and not your resume. That's why it's totally normal to test your coding skills if you apply for a technical role.
I have listed a bunch of resources to help you prepare those coding interviews down in the description just to help you, but just to make it clear, it's not going to be a really long problem. It's just here to assess your basic knowledge of coding. This same thing applies for video interviews. Depending on your role, HR managers would want to see how you speak, how's your body language and how you behave in a stressful situation. Now that you know what skills the company wants, what questions they will probably ask you and how you can answer them in an awesome way, go for it. Take the test.
Before that you want to set aside at least an hour to do it. The last thing you want is being stressed because you have an important appointment making you rush during the test. Cancel anything within an hour after the test. Therefore you can take your time and focus properly. Mute all your notifications and put your phone away, but be careful because some tests might be timed, so monitor that as well. Submit it and you're good to go.
If you follow these steps, you will be among the rare 5% who will prepare those skill assessment tests with that level of dedication. And you'll most likely be among those 5% who get an interview just after that as well. If you want to become better at lending offers at top companies, you have to prepare other types of interviews and just like I mentioned before, you should know how to prepare for a video interview because it's getting more and more popular just like skill assessment tests. That's beneficial also for skill assessment tests because you will have certain questions that requires video as well. Make sure you watch this video next. If you enjoyed this video, hit the like button and share it with a friend who might have a skill assessment test soon. Don't forget to subscribe because I release a new video every week to help you get more interviews and ace more interviews. I'll talk to you soon. Ciao.