What is a good assessment score by a candidate?
tl;dr: It depends, of course. But, we have a rule of thumb if you skip to the bottom.
Let's ask a different question: What is the cost of an apartment? That's a ridiculous question, of course. The answer is, it depends! It depends on the apartment's location, how many rooms it has, whether it has a nuclear bunker, etc. Similarly, whether a candidate's score is good enough depends on your company, and the role's requirements:
Are you looking for someone as your first employee for that role and so they must be exceptionally good? Or are they going to be your 100th employee and so needn't be that good?
Are you Amazon and want to hire the best backend developer in the world? Or, are you Amazon and are OK with an average visual designer?
Are you using Equip to filter candidates out? Or are you using the Equip score as just one other parameter and will be interviewing all candidates anyway?
Recall that an assessment with Equip's content is a set of questions that: (i) test different skills at (ii) different difficulty levels. When you create an assessment, Equip has no idea about your company and the role! It select questions just on skills and difficulty levels.
All that we have said above is accurate, but of course not very helpful 😈 You want to know, if a candidate has scored 65% on an assessment, how should you interpret the result? Or what is a good cut-off score? Depends on your use-case:
Equip is most effective if you want to use it to select the best candidates from a given pool. Recruitment, like politics, is often a relative game. You aren't objectively looking for the best candidate—you are looking for the best from a given list. Let's say you want to shortlist 5 candidates from a pool of 100. You can then just sort all candidates by their overall score and pick the top 5. Equip works brilliantly for this use-case.
But, if you want to objectively judge a candidate by their score, it gets a bit tricky. We do have a rule of thumb, though: say, you create an assessment for a Digital Marketer role with 0-2 years experience. Candidate X scores 70% on this assessment. You can interpret this to mean: Candidate X is better than 70% of practising Digital Marketers with 0-2 years experience. That is, you can interpret the percentage as the percentile. In fact, when we design questions for Equip's content, this is the rule of thumb we utilise. Similarly, if Candidate Y scores 95% on an assessment, it means Candidate Y is better than 95% of candidates who have those skills with that level of experience.
If your assessment has questions from skills at different difficulty levels (say 4 Medium and 2 Hard), then this percentile will be of a weighted average across the different experience levels.
What is a good assessment score?
Let's ask a different question: What is the cost of an apartment? That's a ridiculous question, of course. The answer is, it depends! It depends on the apartment's location, how many rooms it has, whether it has a nuclear bunker, etc. Similarly, whether a candidate's score is good enough depends on your company, and the role's requirements:
Are you looking for someone as your first employee for that role and so they must be exceptionally good? Or are they going to be your 100th employee and so needn't be that good?
Are you Amazon and want to hire the best backend developer in the world? Or, are you Amazon and are OK with an average visual designer?
Are you using Equip to filter candidates out? Or are you using the Equip score as just one other parameter and will be interviewing all candidates anyway?
Recall that an assessment with Equip's content is a set of questions that: (i) test different skills at (ii) different difficulty levels. When you create an assessment, Equip has no idea about your company and the role! It select questions just on skills and difficulty levels.
Shortlisting from a pool v/s Judging a single candidate
All that we have said above is accurate, but of course not very helpful 😈 You want to know, if a candidate has scored 65% on an assessment, how should you interpret the result? Or what is a good cut-off score? Depends on your use-case:
Shortlisting candidates
Equip is most effective if you want to use it to select the best candidates from a given pool. Recruitment, like politics, is often a relative game. You aren't objectively looking for the best candidate—you are looking for the best from a given list. Let's say you want to shortlist 5 candidates from a pool of 100. You can then just sort all candidates by their overall score and pick the top 5. Equip works brilliantly for this use-case.
Rule of thumb for judging a single candidate
But, if you want to objectively judge a candidate by their score, it gets a bit tricky. We do have a rule of thumb, though: say, you create an assessment for a Digital Marketer role with 0-2 years experience. Candidate X scores 70% on this assessment. You can interpret this to mean: Candidate X is better than 70% of practising Digital Marketers with 0-2 years experience. That is, you can interpret the percentage as the percentile. In fact, when we design questions for Equip's content, this is the rule of thumb we utilise. Similarly, if Candidate Y scores 95% on an assessment, it means Candidate Y is better than 95% of candidates who have those skills with that level of experience.
If your assessment has questions from skills at different difficulty levels (say 4 Medium and 2 Hard), then this percentile will be of a weighted average across the different experience levels.
Updated on: 03/02/2024
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