Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Developing an aptitude test for Freshers



It’s fun to create an aptitude test for new hires. All that you have to do is to add some subjective, some 'IQ' types, some technical question and get those hapless candidates to take the test. Your organization will be thankful to you for the test that you have created and those hapless candidates will rarely complain if you, in an unlikely case, make any mistake!

Right? Wrong!! Are you sure that your new test 
  • meets the requirement given in role or job description?
  • weighs the different questions in scorecard appropriately based on their difficulty and criticality levels?
  • conforms to equal opportunity employment requirement?
  • does not give undue importance to a skill or attitude that are not that critical in the job, and vice versa?
  •  is not too easy or too difficult to make results useless in screening candidates?
  •  has adequate, not more nor less, number and variety of questions to assess the desired skills and behavior.


Creating an aptitude test for new hires is not really difficult but it’s easy to make mistakes and a wrong hiring decision can be very expensive. The above check list was useful when I created or administered tests to thousands of employees for my employers.

Happy Assessing....