With artificial intelligence playing a significant role in recruitment today, many traditional screening practices are falling out of vogue while others are evolving to perform new functions.
An example of the latter is talent assessments. As organisations consider the possibilities for augmenting tasks and roles with AI, having a holistic understanding of employees’ current skills and potential for growth has never been more important. This is where talent assessments are proving most valuable.
Once used as a tool for identifying the right candidate for a given role, talent assessments are today increasingly used to uncover valuable people insights and hidden workforce skills; not technical skills like data analytics or web development which can be easily augmented, but rather, soft skills like communication, problem solving and creative thinking. In other words, human skills which can’t be replicated by AI. According to the latest Wiley Workplace Intelligence Survey, the vast majority of organisations believe soft skills are more important now than ever before. Similarly, the World Economic Forum’s Future Skills Report identified creative and analytical thinking, resilience, flexibility and agility as the top five skills required for the future of work.
For organisations seeking to remain competitive in an increasingly complex landscape, success will not only be a result of how well they utilise AI, but how well they harness the soft skills of their workforce.
Conducting talent assessments is the first and arguably most important step when it comes to assessing the skills of any workforce. Aptitude assessments measure problem-solving skills and cognitive ability, as well as a person’s propensity to learn and apply new skills. Psychometric assessments identify sought-after personality traits such as openness to experience and adaptability to change. And learning preference assessments identify the most effective methods for individual growth and development.
A comprehensive suite of talent assessments can therefore help employers to understand where their employees’ unique strengths lie and how they can best utilise them. For many organisations, conducting a talent assessment may also mean uncovering a wealth of hidden talent with the right aptitude and soft skills for a role they aren’t currently employed in. An employee in coding, for example, may uncover strong aptitude for written language comprehension and creative thinking – skills that would make her an excellent fit for a marketing or communications role.
This ability to identify and uncover a workforces’ collective soft skills becomes all the more valuable when understood in the context of universal and rapidly growing skills gaps. And while leaders tend to blame a global skills shortage, it’s evident that many organisations simply aren’t clear on where their skills gaps exist, what their business’ needs really are, and why it’s soft skills – not hard skills – they need to be leveraging.
Talent assessments are one of the most important ways organisations can prepare their workforces for the advent of AI. As AI tools begin to augment and replace employees’ day-to-day tasks, conducting talent assessments mean organisations have a comprehensive understanding of the soft skills available within their workforce, offering a holistic picture of employee strengths and abilities, for when they’re eventually required to move into new, more human-centric roles.
AI can, and inevitably will, replace many things in the workforce as we know it. But it will always struggle to replace fundamentally human qualities like empathy, curiosity, resilience and creativity. These are the skills that organisations must find, nurture and leverage in the future of work.
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