Do you groan every time an employee leaves your company? Of course, you do! Not only do you have to worry about the cost of filling their shoes, but there’s also the time and effort it takes to recruit someone new.

Finding the right candidate to join your organization can definitely be tough. And that’s where Toggl Hire comes in, as a candidate screening tool to slash the time to hire. Your new recruits will be screened, vetted, and onboarded in no time at all.

Why Are Skills Tests Used in Candidate Screening?

Toggl Hire uses skills tests to initially evaluate candidates before progressing them through to the next stage of your recruitment process—for example, an interview. These tests are a fair and effective way to understand whether a candidate has the necessary breadth of skills to join your team.

If you’re recruiting for a specialist role where plenty of technical knowledge is required, the information presented on a resume just won’t cut it. As a recruiter, you need access to hard data to find the most suitable candidates based on their in-depth knowledge of the advertised role.

Reduce the Time to Hire

The hiring process is traditionally long, even though it’s in the best interests of both parties to fill a vacancy, fast.

The LinkedIn Economic Graph team analyzed 400,000 confirmed hires on the LinkedIn platform between June 2021 and March 2021. Looking at the median time to hire in different industries, it takes 47 days to fill a project management role, 48 days to fill a position in research, and 49 days to hire someone in engineering.

As you can see, this is slow work, but it can be improved. Toggl Hire boasts that using their tool helps you “identify top talent and cut your time to hire by 86%.”

How does this work? Instead of wading through resumes, cover letters, or past work references, skills tests allow candidates to screen themselves in or out based on the percentage they achieve in their test.

Create a Skills Test Using Toggl Hire

You can sign up for Toggl Hire for free to create your first skills test. Within your workspace, you’ll choose a template based on the role you’re hiring for. Templates are available in these categories:

  • Technical
  • Sales and Support
  • Marketing
  • Product & Design
  • Human Resources
  • Finance
  • Administrative
  • Languages
  • Internships
  • Personality
  • Frontend Developer
  • Digital Marketer
  • Customer Support
  • Product Lead

Alternatively, if you upgrade your account to a Premium plan, you have the option to Create a Custom Test.

With a template like the Digital Marketer skills test, the tool will generate a 12-question test with a time limit of 15 minutes by default. The skill categories within this test are:

  • Analytics
  • General Marketing
  • Content
  • Facebook Ads
  • Google Ads

You’ll then set the test difficulty, which could be Standard as part of your free plan or Hard if you upgrade to Premium.

Toggl Hire Digital Marketer skills test

Customize Your Skills Test

There are many ways to customize your test to make it the best fit for the position you need to fill. Some options include:

  • Changing how long the test is
  • Changing the number of questions in the test
  • Creating a pass percentage mark
  • Adding or removing primary and secondary skills
  • Enabling anti-cheating measures
  • Adding a video section for the candidate to introduce themselves

You can also add Free Text questions. Instead of simple multiple-choice questions, your free text questions give your candidates the room to describe their thought processes in more detail. This will give you further insight into how they think and can articulate themselves.

Toggl Hire free text questions

Toggl Hire also offers customization of the test’s Landing page to reflect your brand better. Add your logo, relevant photo, and text to welcome the candidate and describe the recruitment journey they’re about to embark on. You may also edit the Test Result page that is displayed following the test to share the candidate’s results.

Share Your Skills Test With Candidates

Once your test is set up, you'll need a job ad to attract the best candidates to your role. Next, you can distribute the test to candidates in a variety of ways:

  • Copy a link to attach to your job board posting
  • Share it on Facebook
  • Embed your test on LinkedIn, either in a post or as a direct message
  • Email candidates directly with the link

Sort Candidates by Test Score

Now, you’ll sit back and wait for the test scores to flood in. All test results will be stored within your Toggl Hire dashboard, where you have a comprehensive overview of how many people have taken the test and what their results are.

Toggl hire example answers in multiple choice test

You can see individual results as well as overall averages. In fact, there’s a wealth of statistics available to help you understand more about how candidates are performing, and what the averages are for scores and time spent taking the test. It’s also possible to add question performance filters, to see how candidates are faring on the more challenging free text questions.

Sort through the candidates who have performed well and add tags to their application. You can also drag individuals through to the next stage of your hiring process.

Collaborate With Your Team

Recruitment is rarely handled by a single person. So, what if you want to connect with your colleagues and ask their opinions about a candidate? This is one of the areas where Toggl Hire excels.

In traditional recruitment, delays are often caused by calendar conflicts, where it can be challenging to arrange screening discussions or formal interviews with multiple managers. This is even more challenging in remote teams distributed across several time zones. But the Toggl Hire dashboard makes it easy to collaborate with your team and make important hiring decisions together.

Within the individual candidate card, you can leave notes for your colleagues to review, or add tags for easier searching. When you’ve agreed to progress a candidate, you’ll hit Invite, which opens up a template invitation for the Video Interview stage of the application. This can be customized if you prefer a phone call or to meet in person.

Toggl Hire candidate success email template

Start Your Candidate Screening

If your company needs to fill vacancies with experienced and talented candidates, a skills test is an efficient way of weeding out applicants who don’t quite hit the mark. Toggl Hire has an intuitive interface and allows you to quickly identify the most promising candidates who you’ll want to see more of at the next stage of your recruitment process.

Why not set up a skills test today and distribute it to your job board, LinkedIn post, or Facebook job ad?