Welcome to the world of take-home assignments! While technical assessments have been common in tech for a long time, take-home assignments have become increasingly popular for all roles in recent years. They’re now a standard part of the recruitment process for many companies, and it’s easy to see why.
Take-home assignments are designed to give candidates a better opportunity to showcase their skills and abilities, and provide employers with more detailed insights into a candidate’s work. However, there is a downside to this type of assessment. If not navigated effectively, take-home assignments can potentially perpetuate bias and inequity in the hiring process.
In this blog post, we’ll dive into some best practices for effective and equitable take-home assignments in the recruitment process.
1. Set clear expectations and guidelines
Before you give out any assignments, make sure you’re setting clear expectations and guidelines. This will ensure that everyone is on the same page and that the assessment is fair and unbiased. Make sure candidates understand the objective and the timeline for completing the assignment. Provide structured guidelines and every resource required to ensure the completion of the assignment is fair. This will avoid any misunderstandings and make the process much smoother for everyone involved.
2. Keep the assignments relevant to the role
Make sure that the assignment you’re giving is relevant to the role that the candidate is applying for. This will help you measure the candidate’s ability to do the job you’re hiring for. The assessment should be a direct reflection of the tasks a new hire would be expected to perform in their role. While you may be tempted to give a more challenging task to test the limits of what your candidate can do, it’s important to be mindful of not creating a bias that could negatively impact the outcome of hiring.
3. Provide clear instructions
It’s important to provide clear instructions with the assignment. Candidates don’t want to guess what they were supposed to do, and ambiguity could lead to frustration or a lack of performance. Make sure that you provide all the information required from the start and use clear and concise language in laying out the rules and expectations of the task.
4. Ensure assignments are unbiased
To create an equitable take-home assignment, you need to make sure that it’s free from bias. Take-home assignments should be very clear and unambiguous. Ensure that the assignment doesn’t favor a particular candidate or discriminate against a group. You want to avoid bringing bias like race, gender and social-economic status into play. The potential for bias can be minimised by having that AI technologies have been proven to avoid the elements of human error to comply with a rigid set of rules augmented by algorithms.
5. Use technology to screen and analyze assignments
Take-home assignments can be overwhelming to review and score when an organization has a lot of applicants. Moreover, it’s difficult to ensure a standardized scoring method that is unbiased when it comes to human evaluation. Nevertheless, AI technologies in recruitment technology, from chatbots to predictive analytics, assist recruiters in screening, analyzing and measuring the candidate’s assignment according to a specific set of rules. This creates an unbiased and standardised process for all candidates and aids them in making a sound decision in the hiring process.
In conclusion, take-home assignments are a much better alternative to in-person interviews which can be biased, long, and stressful for the candidate, especially in the current climate of social distancing. As long as they are constructed clearly and considerately, they provide hiring teams with invaluable insights into a candidate’s abilities, and assist them in making data-based decisions. By following these best practices, recruiters and hiring managers can construct effective and equitable take-home assignments that lead to successful hires. Adopting technology