The Advantages of Employee Knowledge Evaluation Automation
The key to a company’s success is a capable, intelligent workforce. No matter how good you are at running a company, if you don’t have the right kind of people to help you achieve your dream, you aren’t going to make it.
The ideal employee requires minimal supervision, is able to complete their tasks on time, and will even be knowledgeable and experienced enough to give you suggestions of their own on how the process they’re involved in can be upgraded to benefit the company.
To find this kind of employee, you need to have the right kind of screening process, sophisticated enough to differentiate the competent from the unqualified, but simple enough to not scare even the good ones away. For as long as we know it, this has been done with the help of various tests and interviews. As an interviewer, your job is to put your employee in a sort of simulation that mirrors the type of work they’re going to be doing after you potentially hire them. If they do well on this simulation, you know (or at least you hope) that will translate to a competent worker later on.t just
The problem is that this can often be a very complicated, tedious, and time-and-resource-consuming process if it is done manually. For this reason, many major companies have already started using the software in order to automate this process as much as possible, so that it is more efficient and costs the company less.
Today, we want to talk about just a few advantages that your company will be able to enjoy if you choose to switch to an automated employee knowledge evaluation system, so without further ado, here they are.
Printing
If your company is just starting off and you haven’t really hired a lot of employees, and you don’t plan on hiring a lot more anytime soon, then it might still be okay to stick to the old-fashioned pen and paper approach for employee knowledge evaluation – although there are still other benefits of automation that you would be missing out on.
But if you have a large number of employees, then the first thing you should think about is how much money you’re spending on printing costs. For every new test you need an additional piece of paper, and for a big company this can add up to being quite an expense, pretty quickly.
The great thing about software-based knowledge evaluation is that it is performed with the help of computers, so you need virtually no paper at all. Additionally, if you’re legally obliged to destroy the testing material, that means that switching to software means you can ditch the paper shredders as well.
Staff Requirements
Putting testing material into practice not only requires a substantial amount of paper, but also human personnel for supervising and elaboration purposes. This personnel would have to be present every time a test is being conducted, ready to answer any queries or questions that the evaluated party might have about the test itself.
This is where it comes in handy to use software for the purpose of employee knowledge evaluation. Because testees can choose to be evaluated at any given time, and since the Internet allows for instant contact with your supervisor, it means that the personnel tasked with assistance don’t have to be in the same room as the person taking the test. Additionally, what you can do is put together an easily accessible FAQ within the testing software itself that the testee might find sufficiently helpful so they don’t even have to contact anybody.
Time Efficiency
The beauty of computers is that while they’re incapable of original thought and pretty much have to be “told” what to do, they’re much, much faster than any human could ever hope to be. Modern computer processors can perform billions of operations per second, which means they can multitask billions of times better than a human and perform all those tasks at the same speed.
There is a lot of information involved in the knowledge evaluation of new employees, not only grading but also statistically analyzing the collective results in order to improve the testing process. A good piece of testing software can do all of this on its own, and just provide you with the information you need. It’s really a huge step up from the manual approach, especially if you have a large number of tests that you need to gather all this information from.
Objectivity & Consistency
Finally, possibly the biggest advantage you’ll be able to get from automated knowledge evaluation stems from the two things that computers will always be superior to humans at consistency, and objectivity. When performing the same task, over and over again for many repetitions (like working on a treadmill, or grading a test), the human mind gets tired and becomes more prone to errors. It’s unavoidable that you’ll make mistakes and therefore not be able to deliver the same kind of quality each time around.
This is exactly the opposite when it comes to computers. Once you tell a computer what to do, it automates the process and performs it according to a certain set of rules, and does it identically each time around. This is invaluable when it comes to scoring tests and ranking employees, because you completely eliminate the human factor, in a good way.
The same goes for objectivity. We, humans, are very subjective by nature, no matter how much we try not to be. Even small, intricate differences between candidates such as their handwriting can influence our final decision, in a way that they really shouldn’t be. Computers don’t possess the ability to be biased, so using them to evaluate employees is fairer and will deliver a far more objective and precise decision, as long as the programmed testing process is doing its job correctly.
