Why You Need to Create Your Own Question Bank?

Assessment tests are one of the fool-proof ways of shortlisting the right candidates at a campus recruitment drive. These assessment tests evaluate the students for their subject knowledge, aptitude and other skills, and the selected candidates then move on to the interview rounds for further evaluation. Typically, the HR conducts two to three rounds of objective and subjective tests which comprise aptitude, reasoning, or logical questions, verbal reasoning questions and subject-specific questions. This helps them to identify the potential candidates who can be interviewed and recruited into the company based on their performance.

Assessment tests are either designed by the hiring company in-house with the help of its internal teams or outsourced to a third party company based on their requirement. The tests created by the third-party are generic, focusing more on evaluating the general skills such as English, aptitude and problem-solving ability of the students, unless and until specified by the recruiting company to add subject-related questions as well. These tests are meant for basic-level screening and cannot completely test the students for their subject expertise and other skills. For a more comprehensive evaluation, it is necessary to create self-prepared question bank since it provides an opportunity to align questions with the skill sets desired by the interviewers or the recruiters and assess students for them before shortlisting candidates for hire.

If you are a recruiting firm seeking an opinion on creating your own assessment tests package with specific questions to test the candidates’ knowledge in a detailed manner, read till the end of this blog post as we walk you through the advantages of doing so.

Advantages of Having Your Own Question Bank

In a campus recruitment drive, if you carry your own question bank rather than depending on some third-party agencies to prepare them, you will spend less time filtering candidates appearing in various rounds; you will target the right set of candidates and shortlist the top performers quickly and efficiently. Discussed below are the advantages of creating your question banks while visiting a college for conducting a campus recruitment drive.

• Check for specific skill sets: When you design you own question bank, you will able to add questions that test specific skill sets in candidates rather than focusing on generic capabilities. For instance, for an IT company looking to hire a programmer, the HR can design coding-specific questions and screen candidates with the required talent and filter out average performers. This will help you shortlist candidates efficiently as the chances of selecting the average candidates reduces to a large extent.  
• Need not rely on third-party firms: If you entirely rely on third-party agencies for assessment questions, chances are you might not be satisfied with the questions designed in question bank since they may be too generic and mundane and might not solve the purpose of filtering the underperformers. If you design your own question bank, you can decide on what type of questions you must add according to the skill sets you wish to evaluate and then create a question bank which solves this purpose.
• Only the right candidate moves to interview round: When candidates attempt the questions designed by the third-party agencies, there are high chances of both top and average performers getting selected since the assessment tests are created to be generic and easy. If you design your own question bank, you will focus more on evaluating the desired skills and subject knowledge required for the job profile. This will help you filter out the average candidates and move the right ones to the interview round and save the interviewer’s time.
• Chances of bad hire reduces: External question banks, more often than not, assess only the basic skills of the candidates owing to their general and common questions. If you rely on such assessment tests, you might end up making a bad hire since the candidates you shortlist may not possess the skill sets required for the job profile. A bad hire will affect you in both monetary and resource front as multiple candidates who do not have the talent and skills to perform a job will lead to a downfall in the overall productivity of the company.  
• No scope of pre-determining the assessment questions: Many candidates might be aware of the questions present in the third-party assessments since multiple companies use the same assessment questions, or these questions are shared between the students. This can lead to a bad hire for the recruiters causing all their recruitment efforts to fail. On the other hand, if you create your own question bank focusing on skills and knowledge required for the job profile, you will hire the top talent in the campus and filter out the average candidates easily.  This will save you a lot of time and effort and also promise you the best candidates in the college.

In a nutshell
It is important for the recruiters to not completely bank on third-party assessment tests when they seeking candidates with specific skill sets for the job profile. In such a situation, creating their own question bank comes handy in evaluating the candidates better and shortlisting only the right ones for the interview round. This saves a lot of time for the HR as well as the interviewer since they will only have to focus on assessing the shortlisted candidates further and make a final call on hiring them. In case you are a recruiting firm looking for some help in in creating customized question banks that focus on specific skill sets of the candidates, we might be of some help to you. Visit us at https://pod.ai/employers and avail our services to conduct a smooth campus recruitment.