Skill Assessment and Hiring!!!

Imagine this you need to hire someone for a particular job position in your company. And for which you have received about 50 resumes,all of them look equally good. For you to Interview the 50 of them would be a tedious and time consuming task.

You also need to take care that you hire the right person for the job.Hiring the wrong person , could cost the company a lot of money. Business experts say that 95% of a company's success is hiring correctly.

Most companies today resort to Skill Assessment which is a method to evaluate the candidate before making the hiring decision.Skill assessment tests, when used in conjunction with an interview and the manager's intuition is one of the very good ways of finding the right candidate.

Today skill assessment tests could be given online and from any part of the world. Based on these results you can filter your candidates.

Geek evaluation is one such tool, which helps you to evaluate the skills of your candidate And this can be done in three easy steps:

*Step 1:*

Create your own tests from our existing question banks or upload your own questions!

* Step 2:*

Schedule the candidate for the tests. A mail is send to the candidate.

*Step 3 :*

Candidate logs on the site and takes the test.

Once the candidate has taken the test, the results are evaluated and emailed to you.

One of the best features of Geek evaluation is that it allows you to add your own questions and create tests from these questions. Also the questions presented to the candidates are at random and of varying levels of difficulty

Based on these results you can choose maybe the 5 or 10 best candidates and then call them for an interview.Thus making the whole hiring process so much easier :P)

Google analytics new features

Google has announced new features on its analytics. This feature set is more for the professional users .Google has given a powerful tool in the the hands of professionals who want to analyze the traffic statistics at no cost .
For geekevaluation and job screening , we use google analytics

Online skill eveluation

While we were publicizing , geekevaluation , one of the renowned person posed this question

1. There are plenty of LMSs out there with this functionality and more - what makes your special?

2. You say the user takes the test on their own (you email them the link). This is more or less useless unless the test is conducted in a proctored environment (anyone can look up answers online, or ask a friend)

A very genuine questions from customer perspective.

My reply was
we are different in sense that
a) we allow users to customize tests by selecting more than one topic so for eg you want to hire a Sr programmer with skills in Java, Oracle and AJAX. You can create a test by combining these three topics and defining hwo many questions are required in each topic.
b) You can create your own tests and that would cost 75% less.
c) Talking about content , our question bank on technical topics is something which you might not find with others as we had designed questions based on practical experience , not just concept.

These 3 features are a big plus and differentiate us.

Yes it is true that the candidate can search for answers and call a friend. To tackle this

1.For now we disabled copy/paste so that user cannot do googling. In programming questions, it is difficult to call up some one , explain the code and get the answer. The shortest was to do is copy paste , find answer in google or run the code your self.
Disabling copy paste would solve some of these issues.
2.We had thought of proctored environment but that would be sometimes in future.
3.We are also thinking of tracking IP address to at least ensure that the candidate had taken the test from the city in which he resides.

And let us not forget that this is just the elimination , not the selection criteria

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Online Skill Assessment

Finding the right candidate for the job is a tedious task today due to the large number of applicants. Choosing the right candidate for the job is a crucial decision for any company. In fact, according to a study conducted by the Harvard Business School, making poor hiring decisions can cost a company as much as three times an employee's annual compensation package.

Thus most of the companies resort to skill assessment which is a method to evaluate the candidate before making the hiring decision. There are various forms of skills assessment like management skills, people skills, communication skills and technical skills.

Skill assessment, tests when used in conjunction with an interview and the manager's intuition is one of the very good ways of finding the right candidate.

Today the internet is almost indispensable, online skill assessment is becoming more and more popular for companies and recruitment firms. And it is really simple to use as all you need is an internet connection and a web browser, no software needs to be downloaded.

Geek evaluation is one such tool, which helps you to evaluate the technical skills of your candidate once you have short listed them. It helps you customize your own tests or choose questions from their huge question bank and evaluates the candidate based on their results at very affordable rates.


The questions presented to the candidates are random and of varying levels of difficulty. And their results can be easily analyzed by topics as well as level of difficulty.

For more details log on to our website at www.geekevaluation.com or please email at shruti.sharma@geekevaluation.com for login details if you would like to have a tour of the application.

Tools for a startup - Part 1

One of the friends asked me when I was developing geekevaluation as to why I chose java.
My response was that I chose java because I know java.
Even if there was something which was better ,I would not have developed the application in a new language or platform because I want to work on my business plan , not learning new skill.There is your first tool

1. Chose the language you are comfortable with : Start your product development with the tools and technology you are comfortable with. Remember the idea here is to get a product which should validate your business idea, not your technical skills.

I also prefer Java because the power it gives in terms of open source. There are so many tools , servers , IDE free of cost to help you get started.What a beautiful thing software development is .
Can you imagine where you can start your business by not spending a penny ?

2. Source control options : I would imagine that you are a bunch of guys who are working at different locations.You could also have outsourced project to some small company and now you want to manage source code where all of you could do check in/check out.
I looked around a couple of ones.CVS dude is a popular options these days if you want to use CVS as a respository.
If you prefer to use SVN over CVS the code spaces & unfuddle are good choices.
For me the ideas was to keep the cost at minimum so I looked at code spaces and unfuddle.
I had some issues with code spaces repository when working with eclipse after 6-8 months so then swicthed to unfuddle.

3. Online meetings : Another important tool to hold weekly meetings .I am using dimdim for now which is free for 5 users. I am ok with the quality so far(there is voice lag in it).
Another tool suggested by one of the friends wasMikogo . Here you can share your dashboard.

I will cover hosting,email options in next post