Should recruiters develop their own assessment tools or outsource the task?

A few days back, we ran a discussion on several social networking platforms to reach out to the recruiting community and asked them if recruiters should develop their own assessment tools or hire the services of assessment specialists. A strong majority shared the same idea – focus on what you do best i.e. understand the client’s needs, pool in candidates, perform pre-screening to generate qualified leads etc. and allow specialists to take care of the assessment design and development. Some of the comments that people shared were:

1. Executive search firms and staffing firms have a large number of tasks that they need to perform from client need identification, job postings, talent pooling and talent pre-screening etc. Designing and developing their own assessments would require them to shift their focus from areas that are their core expertise.
2. Building their own expertise on talent assessments would incur a fixed cost while partnering up with a specialized assessment firm would at most bring in a project-based expense, improving the bottom line against each hire.
3. The competition in the industry is increasingly become intense. There are retained search recruiters, transactional recruiters and cross-industry recruiters – all are offering their services to YOUR client. You only get ONE shot to deliver the right candidate and hence conducting the right assessment has become critical to the hiring decision.
4. As new online assessments are popping up on the screen, cross-border talent acquisition and geographically-separated candidate screening is more cost effective than ever. The ROI on online assessment platforms is comfortably high and clients appreciate the value of assessments in the on-boarding process
The trend is shifting – talent assessment is a key process in talent acquisition and talent management. Recruiters, job boards, ATS providers and staffing firms – all are partnering up with specialist assessment firms to add it to their portfolio of service offerings. Executive search firms and staffing firms that traditionally were using their own generic assessment tools are not moving toward specialized, job-specific assessments to get the most out of it.