Smarter Hiring - Maximise Billable Hours With Automated Skills Assessments On Alooba

Shen Liu is currently a principal at the rapidly growing data science & AI consultancy firm Logickube, based in Sydney. Liu was leading the data science function at Australia’s largest employer Woolworths, before being poached by Logickube to spearhead their new business.

Liu was already well aware of Alooba’s capabilities, which was a critical component of scaling WooliesX’s data science team, helping them to break free of the shackles of traditional recruitment.

I was at WooliesX (Woolworths) and we used Alooba and it was a highly positive experience. We had a large number of candidates

Having moved into the consulting world with Logickube, Liu became acutely aware of the opportunity cost of time. Every hour they were spending on recruitment, was an hour they weren’t billable. He knew that the traditional recruitment process was going to burn a hole in their pocket pretty quickly.

Liu’s experience with more traditional hiring approaches early on at WooliesX had left a lasting impression. Prior to levelling up to the Alooba tech, Woolworths had taken the common approach of each team lead hacking together their own take home test.

At WooliesX, previously we were quite dependent on the designed test from the team leads. That was quite a manual process. We realised it would take too much time from us.

Liu was keen to avoid this timesuck with Logickube, and so instead of building out their own take-home tests, he decided to engage Alooba, leveraging their automated skills screening tech. Manual take-home tests typically cost about 2000-3000 USD per hire made, and this is just the administrative costs!

The time saved is great. Even spending 15 minutes per candidate with a manual test would be huge - hours per week, but with Alooba we just see the numbers immediately.

With powerful new technologies like Alooba, sometimes there’s an assumption that they might be hard to navigate or require a lot of upfront learning & upskilling. That’s far from the case, as Liu points out.

Onboarding was pretty smooth and the process was really straightforward. You just need to select sections of different topics. The UI was great; it was easy to navigate. The test design is straightforward.

A test is only really as good as the questions that are in it. Garbage in, garbage out, as they say. With the Alooba content carefully hand-crafted by industry experts, Liu knew that a good test performance would indicate a strong on-the-job-performance.

Part of the challenge of developing your own manual tests is that while it might be easy to hack together a test for one skill (e.g. SQL), it will be incredibly difficult to build out enough questions to cover all the skills for the role, and impossible to do this if you yourself don’t possess these skills.

The question bank - especially the multiple choice and SQL questions - are quite diversified and we were able to set different levels of difficulty.

Leveraging the depth and breadth of the Alooba content becomes a game-changer for lots of organisations, especially when they don’t have the knowledge in-house already.

Alooba has more than 3500 questions covering 50+ technical skills, soft skills, personality & IQ. With a wide variety of test types, customers have the freedom to evaluate candidates how they choose.

In addition, customers can augment the Alooba expert content with their own content, which helps covering business-specific concepts.

We like the flexibility of how you can design a business function question in your free response section and let the candidates record a video. Not only do we assess their technical skills, we can easily identify those people who are really good at talking business.

Being able to evaluate a candidate’s technical skills & soft skills in one platform makes Alooba a powerful weapon in a company’s hiring arsenal.