So, welcome to our Digital Skills game-based Assessment designs!

An Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society, Rob Williams is a Chartered Psychologist with over 25 years of experience working and designing tests. He is also the author of five psychometric test design books and has worked for the leading global psychometric test publishers including SHL, Kenexa IBM, MBTI, CAPP and SOVA Assessment.

Our HireVue Game-Based Assessment designs

Between 2017-2020 we led the psychometric test design input to the MindX design team for their game-based learning assessment (GBA) tools. This has continued since the HireVue takeover of the MindX company in May 2018.

The digital assessment supplier Hire Vue, with their cutting-edge cognitive ability mini-game tests, is the leading worldwide supplier of game-based assessment.

Hirevue / MindX 

Game based assessment designs assessing skills such as:

• Mental agility
• Verbal agility
• Problem solving
• Thinking speed
• Accuracy
• Attention to detail
• Processing speed
• Mental maths

SAMA coaching skills tips 

Harappa skills based assessments for

• Graduates
• Managers
• Leaders

Best virtual assessments design

Any virtual assessments design still needs to ensure that each assessment centre exercise…

• Evaluates the competencies needed to execute specific business strategies.
• Predicts when, for example, leaders will be ready to execute those strategies.
• Facilitates continuous development, and track improvement of abilities in real-time.

Suitable exercises for virtual assessment centres

The reliability of any exercise depends upon many factors:

• Quality of the competency framework.
• Use of experienced and well-briefed / well-trained assessors.

Director Assessment Centre Design

Assessment centres have a well-proven track record for recruiting new employees and selecting existing staff for promotion. Research supports their use as one of the most valid and fair processes available to occupational psychologists – if used in accordance with best practice.

An assessment centre involves written exercise, intray exercise, presentation exercise, role play, and / or a group exercise. Group exercises and presentation exercises are particularly popular for graduate assessment centres.

Why use Virtual Assessment Centres for Director jobs?

An assessment allows the candidate to demonstrate abilities in practice. Whereas an interview cannot do this.

We believe it is less appropriate to use a battery of assessment techniques for jobs requiring basic level skills. Rather than enhancing the outcome, this could put potential applicants off.

Role analysis for virtual assessment centres

• The job title.
• The main purpose of the job.
• The main tasks, responsibilities, and operations the job involves.
• Supervision given and received
• Work conditions
• Initial requirements from a candidate.

– – – Virtual assessment design – – –

After reassuring the hiring ratio and time schedule, the next stage is to define the jobs in demand. In role analysis, the smallest unit of analysis is a task. A task is an assigned piece of work that is finished to some standard within some piece of time. The tasks performed by one individual are termed as a position. All identical or similar positions make up a job.

Virtual Assessment Centres – Fairness

Additional methods of assessment can, therefore:

• Improve the quality and quantity of information on which to base the selection decision
• Allow candidates to demonstrate how they meet requirements, rather than relying on self-report and performance at interview.

The most effective way of predicting job performance is to use a mix of assessment methods and look at the results in an integrated way to build up a picture of the candidate.

The most complex being a full Assessment Centre using a range of tests and exercises. In our opinion, assessment centres have the best ROI for graduate and for managerial positions.

Tips for Virtual Assessment Centres

Our virtual assessment centre tips – It’s important for graduate applicants to demonstrate they can collaborate across country borders. Online, “virtual” assessment centres provide a realistic job preview of team working in a digital age. Efficient virtual assessment centres are becoming increasingly popular.

Digital Skills Test designs and GBA designs

Here we describe digital skills tests. These are used to verify whether a candidate has the skills they say they have, and are proficient enough to do the job.

For example, a design challenge using Photoshop for graphic designer. Or a proof reading test for editors.

Superskills and Microskills

The market uses various terms to describe skills (eg, abilities, skills, competencies, soft skills, work skills, hard skills, etc.). It’s time to sort this out and use a simpler vernacular going forward.

As we see it, skills include two types of skills: superskills and microskills.

Superskills are the “components” that make up the unique “operating system” of a person. These include, but not limited to, problem solving, critical thinking, quantitative thinking, creativity, listening, communication, change agility, perseverance, motivation, willingness to learn, curiosity, coachability, social skills, leadership, risk-tolerance, and working in teams.

Microskills are the “apps” that the person “runs” (or could run) on their unique superskills “operating system.” These are the things a person can do really well (or learn to do), given their unique superskills footprint. Microskills can include graphic design, software development, financial modeling, equity trading, project management, enterprise sales, product development, QA testing, school teaching, journalistic writing, market research, urban planning, etc.

Virtual assessment design

Graduate Video Interview Tips

During the recent years of recession, the number of graduate entry roles became even more restricted; making graduate recruitment even more competitive. Microsoft, for example, received 15,000 job applications for each of its 150 graduate position in 2009. That year, the success ratio of applications to job offers was 1:100 at Microsoft.

This has created a “bottleneck” between the high number of recent graduates and the considerably lower number who are successfully placed on graduate entry schemes. Clearly, there are severe implications of such a challenging job market for graduates.

For employers too, there is a “war on talent” to find and sign-up the best possible graduates in the marketplace. It is a recruiters’ market, however most recruiters want to recruit the top echelon of high-performing graduates who are showing the best leadership potential, the most effective ability to work in teams, the highest levels of motivation and drive etc. SJTs offer an effective means of measuring each of these abilities and attributes.

Game based learning skills

The popularity of video games has drawn researchers’ attention in the exploration of the possibility of using video games to enhance knowledge, skills, and other personal attributes.

The idea of using games for serious purposes other than entertainment is called game-based learning. Advocates of game-based learning argue that well-designed video games represent solid learning principles. A fair amount of research shows that game-based learning is at least as effective as nongame conditions, such as class- room contexts.

In addition, when game-based assessment is designed following a principled design framework such as evidence-centered design or cognitive design system, the assessment is likely to have high validity and reliability.

Digital Skills transformation

Game-based assessment is essentially performance-based assessment. Tasks that require students to demonstrate their knowledge and skills by working through a task. Rather than a simple test of one’s ability to recall or recognize information, or supply self-reported information, performance-based assessment provides students with the opportunity to show their understanding and apply knowledge in meaningful settings.

Our Virtual Work Skills Resources

Scholars generally support the use of performance-based assessment to measure and support twenty-first-century skills over conventional types of assessment such as multiple-choice questions or filling in the blanks.

Virtual Assessment design

Good games can provide an engaging and authentic environment designed to keep practice meaningful and personally relevant. With simulated visualization, authentic problem solving, and instant feedback, computer games can afford a realistic framework for experimentation.

Another key feature of well-designed games that can enhance learning and motivation is adaptivity related to providing appropriate and adaptive levels of challenge. Gee has argued that the secret of a good game is not its D graphics and other bells and whistles, but its underlying architecture in which each level dances around the outer limits of the player’s abilities, seeking at every point to be hard enough to be just doable.

Similarly, psychologists (e.g., Vygotsky) have long argued that the best instruction hovers at the boundary of a student’s competence. Flow is another name for this phenomenon. It is a construct first proposed by Csikszentmihalyi to describe an optimal experiential state that involves complete immersion in an activity and a deep sense of enjoyment. Flow represents full engagement, which is crucial for deep learning.

Digital Skills transformation

The vast number of data points that are now included in traditional, gamified and game-based assessments gives you more information to interpret, so you can make more accurate decisions about your candidates. Also, because the way each of us processes information and responds when we’re assessed is unique, it’s now possible to create a ‘psychometric fingerprint’ for each candidate. Knowing not only what score a candidate achieved but how they went about it can help you to prevent cheating and spot potential.

virtual assessment design

Graduate digital skills transformation

Graduate recruiters who want to minimise recruitment costs see online ability tests as an efficient and effective means of sifting the initial applicant pool. Verbal and numerical reasoning tests offer a reliable and standardised way to ensure that an optimal number of good candidates are seen by the business at the much more expensive ‘face-to-face’ stage. Chances are that this next stage will involve a retest in order to verify that the candidate who took the online test was who they said they were!

Online testing is particularly attractive for the ease with which multinational organisations can offer the same test(s) in a wide range of different languages to graduates around the world. The use of standardised tests in the recruitment process helps to ensure that applicants from different countries and from different ethnic groups are treated fairly.

We believe in the benefits of practice and ensuring fairness in testing. We, therefore, offer some practice aptitude tests and some practice psychometric tests. The intention is to promote as ‘level a playing-field’ as possible.

virtual assessment design

Employability Skills

All of our psychometric test practice resources are free. So, we hope you enjoy using them!   In our opinion, there is plenty of the right type of aptitude test practice, aptitude test tips and test-taking strategies.

We certainly hope you get maximum value from our free psychometric test practice resources!  Psychometric test practise works best when it’s specific to the test type and the level of difficulty of the psychometric test you will be taking.

Virtual Assessment Centre Design

Assessment centres have a well-proven track record for recruiting new employees and selecting existing staff for promotion. Research supports their use as one of the most valid and fair processes available to occupational psychologists – if used in accordance with best practice.

An assessment centre involves written exercise, intray exercise, presentation exercise, role play, and / or a group exercise. Group exercises and presentation exercises are particularly popular for graduate assessment centres.

Why use Virtual Assessment Centres for Director jobs?

An assessment allows the candidate to demonstrate abilities in practice. Whereas an interview cannot do this.

We believe it is less appropriate to use a battery of assessment techniques for jobs requiring basic level skills. Rather than enhancing the outcome, this could put potential applicants off.

Role analysis for virtual assessment centres

• The job title.
• The main purpose of the job.
• The main tasks, responsibilities, and operations the job involves.
• Supervision given and received
• Work conditions
• Initial requirements from a candidate.

Virtual assessment design

After reassuring the hiring ratio and time schedule, the next stage is to define the jobs in demand. In role analysis, the smallest unit of analysis is a task. A task is an assigned piece of work that is finished to some standard within some piece of time. The tasks performed by one individual are termed as a position. All identical or similar positions make up a job.

Virtual Assessment Design Centres – Fairness

Additional methods of assessment can, therefore:

• Improve the quality and quantity of information on which to base the selection decision
• Allow candidates to demonstrate how they meet requirements, rather than relying on self-report and performance at interview.

The most effective way of predicting job performance is to use a mix of assessment methods and look at the results in an integrated way to build up a picture of the candidate.

The most complex being a full Assessment Centre using a range of tests and exercises. In our opinion, assessment centres have the best ROI for graduate and for managerial positions.

Tips for Virtual Assessment Centres

Our virtual assessment centre tips – It’s important for graduate applicants to demonstrate they can collaborate across country borders. Online, “virtual” assessment centres provide a realistic job preview of team working in a digital age. Efficient virtual assessment centres are becoming increasingly popular.

Our aptitude test design projects

• Aptitude test tips : for Numerical reasoning, verbal reasoning, abstract reasoning and decision analysis tests
• Critical reasoning test design (legal and financial sectors)