The Adaface manifesto

Pre-employment tests sucked for years. Not anymore — we fixed them. Here's our approach towards designing tests & building the product.

1. Pre-employment tests should used be for elimination, not for selection.

The most important thing while implementing pre-employment assessments in any hiring process is that it is an elimination tool, not a selection tool. In other words: you want to use the test to eliminate the candidates who do poorly on the test, not to select the candidates who come out at the top.

These might look like the same thing, but it is important to understand that the cut-off score you use needs to be decided for the purpose of elimination, not for selection. While they are super valuable, pre-employment tests do not paint the entire picture of a candidate’s abilities, knowledge, and motivations.

2. Pre-employment tests should be short & candidate friendly.

When you’re designing a test to eliminate unqualified candidates, a 30-40 min test is optimal (whereas a test to find the most qualified candidate could be 120 mins or longer). Over hundreds of thousands of tests we’ve done at Adaface so far, we’ve found that a 40 min test is able to eliminate 70-80% of candidates.

Also, with a shorter test candidates are able to commit to completing in on the same day, as opposed to having to schedule it for the weekend. This ensures that we have the highest test completion rate in the industry (Adaface has a 86% completion rate, as opposed to an industry standard of 30-50% completion rate).

3. Using trick questions on pre-employment tests doesn’t make sense.

Traditional assessment tools use trick questions and puzzles for the screening, which creates a lot of frustration among candidates about having to go through irrelevant screening assessments.

The main reason we started Adaface is that traditional pre-employment assessment platforms are not a fair way for companies to evaluate candidates. We started Adaface to help companies find great candidates by assessing on-the-job skills required for a role.

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