One way to get a better look at your prospective pick’s promise is to test them. Now, the word ‘test’ conjures all sorts of unpleasant mental images about sitting in a quiet room filling in bubbles on a multiple-choice scan-sheet. Fear not! While that type of testing can be useful to some businesses, it is not the type of testing I am talking about. When I say you should test your employees, I mean you should assess their ability to directly perform the kind of tasks your company runs on.

If you are hiring a salesperson, ask them how they would pitch you the product; If you are hiring a programmer, ask them to submit their portfolio. If you are handling your testing in-house, you will have to be flexible based on what your company needs and what time and resources it can spare for testing.

Of course, if you are willing to look outside of your company for assistance, TalentCube can handle the testing for you so that your team can remain focused on their projects instead of on concocting ways to measure a prospective hire’s talent. If your team is small and busy, I highly recommend this option.

A word of warning; testing is helpful, but it isn’t not a magic bullet. One of my main qualms with interviews is that businesses treat them as a be all end all. That mentality is poisonous no matter what sort of hiring assessment a company applies it to. None of the methods I will suggest for replacing interviews are meant to take over as the alpha and omega of talent assessment; there simply is no one talent assessment method that you can rely upon as the last word. Using a combination approach is best and TalentCube offers just the platform.