6 tools for busy HR professionals

Jennifer Manning
hands holding a tablet interacting with it

More and , giving candidates the opportunity to apply for jobs from anywhere in the country and across the world. In turn, this wider net has enabled HR professionals to bring in giant pools of qualified candidates – and of course, more great hires.

But with more job applications coming in, HR professionals know they need to work faster and more efficiently. And the right HR tools can help teams save time and standardize hiring across the board – especially when assessing candidates’ English skills or personality traits from afar.

Need help choosing the best HR software? We’ve got you covered. Here are 6 tools for busy HR professionals – including a number of HR tests for measuring sought-after soft skills:

1. Versant by ɫèAV

How it helps you: Test candidates’ English language abilities with AI

Need a fair way to test candidates’ English skills? Versant by ɫèAV is an HR test that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to score language assessments instantly. Made by ɫèAV, the world’s leading education company, the tool tests candidates’ speaking, listening, reading and writing skills to help HR professionals evaluate how easily someone can handle different workplace tasks – like speaking with customers over the phone or writing clear emails to co-workers.

Versant by ɫèAV also provides an Intelligibility Index score, which objectively measures how well someone pronounces words or expresses their thoughts – both things that are important for effective workplace communication, but easily overlooked.

The test is available 24/7, with no appointment required, in more than 100 countries around the world.

Learn more about how Versant by ɫèAV works

2. Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal

How it helps you: Measure important critical thinking skills

The Watson-Glaser test is a popular critical thinking assessment. In fact, it’s been around for more than a century, helping organizations and institutions measure the decision-making and rational thinking skills of employees, job applicants, and students alike.

The Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal tool makes it easy to administer the test on a larger scale. The assessment is timed (it takes 30 minutes) and includes a large bank of questions to help make sure no one ends up writing the same test. The scores are also given as a percentile, based around the following three criteria: whether someone can recognize assumptions, evaluate arguments and draw conclusions.

Overall, it’s a great tool to use with current employees wanting to move up in the organization. But best of all? It can help HR professionals screen out candidates whose critical thinking skills aren’t up to par – and save time interviewing people who might be qualified on paper, but not necessarily in practice.

3. Golden Personality Profiler

How it helps you: Assess a candidate’s personality type and how it will affect their behavior at work.

is one of the most in-depth personality assessments on the market. It allows HR professionals to understand what makes an individual unique. In turn, this leads to greater self-acceptance among employees and the ability to value differences in others—key factors impacting team performance.

So, how does it work? Powered by Jung’s Theory of Type as well as the Five-Factor Model of personality, Golden identifies the most detailed aspects of an individual’s personality. The program presents findings in a clear and concise report to make it easy to understand.

Of course, this is all good information to have in mind. But how can personality tests be helpful for HR? Not only does this test help predict how well candidates will perform at work, but it also helps to quickly identify a team’s strengths and resources and its potential weaknesses and blind spots. Furthermore, this tool can help HR professionals hire people who will match, or help shape, the company culture.

4. Acsendo

How it helps you: Run assessments and improve employee performance

For many workplaces, it can be difficult to keep morale up. Many people have reported feeling overwhelmed, isolated and unproductive working from home. , on the other hand, can help HR professionals push employee engagement and measure how everyone’s performing.

Within the tool, HR teams can run company assessments to measure employee satisfaction and how they view their work environment, among other things.

It also enables HR to see if workers’ objectives align with company-wide goals, for example, and helps teams create development plans for employees. Even more, Acscendo advertises that their platform only takes a few days for teams to implement.

5. Odoo

How it helps you: Manage employees and recruit from one place

is a pretty popular HR platform; they say they have more than 5 million users worldwide. The tool lets users keep track of things like employee leaves, hours worked, expenses and evaluations all in one place – as well as recruit and manage new job applications, for example.

We also like that they’re open source and that more than 20,000 developers contribute to it globally.

6. Raven’s

How it helps you: Assess the skills needed for leadership positions and reduce bias

Raven’s is another HR test to assess an employee’s soft skills. But it takes into special account the unique skills needed for leadership or management positions. These skills include abstract reasoning, complex problem-solving, and observation skills, among others.

HR professionals get a report with the results. It shows how the candidate compares to others in the same role. The test isn’t influenced by language differences, and overall, it gives HR professionals a better understanding of who’s actually best for the job.

More blogs from ɫèAV

  • A group of young people sat at a table drinking and eating

    How the English language has changed over the decades

    By Steffanie Zazulak

    All languages change over time, and there can be many different reasons for this. The English language is no different – but why has it changed over the decades?

    Some of the main influences on the evolution of languages include:

    • The movement of people across countries and continents, for example, migration and, in previous centuries, colonization. For example, English speakers today would probably be comfortable using the Spanish word 'loco' to describe someone who is 'crazy'.
    • Speakers of one language coming into contact with those who speak a different one. No two individuals speak identically: people from different geographical places clearly speak differently and even within the same community there are variations according to a speaker’s age, gender, ethnicity and social and educational background. For example, the word 'courting' has become 'dating'.
    • New vocabulary required for inventions such as transport, domestic appliances and industrial equipment, or for sporting, entertainment, cultural and leisure reasons. For example, the original late 19th century term 'wireless' has become today’s 'radio'.

    Due to these influences, a language always embraces new words, expressions and pronunciations as people come across new words and phrases in their day-to-day lives and integrate them into their own speech.

    What changes has the English language seen?

    As the English language has changed, it’s been easy to pick out words that pass into common usage. Here at ɫèAV English, we have explored some of these recent changes to the English language. The rise in popularity of internet slang has seen phrases such as 'LOL' (Laugh Out Loud), 'FOMO' (Fear Of Missing Out) and 'fam' (an abbreviated form of family) become firmly embedded in the English language over the past ten years.

    Every decade sees new slang terms like these appearing in the English language. And while some words or abbreviations do come from internet or text conversations, others may appear as entirely new words, a new meaning for an existing word, or a word that becomes more generalized than its former meaning, brought about by any one of the reasons above. Decades ago, 'blimey' was a new expression of surprise, but more recently 'woah' is the word in everyday usage.

    Sentence structure is of course, another change to the English language. Decades ago, it would have been normal to ask 'Have you a moment?' Now, you might say 'D’you have a sec?' Similarly, 'How do you do?' has become 'How’s it going?' Not only have the sentences been abbreviated, but new words have been introduced to everyday questions.

    Connected to this is the replacement of certain words with other, more modern versions. It’s pretty noticeable that words like 'shall' and 'ought' are on the way out, but 'will', 'should' and 'can' are doing just fine.

    Other changes can be more subtle. Many verbs can take a compliment with another verb in either the '-ing' form or the 'to' form, for example, 'they liked painting/to paint', 'we tried leaving/to leave', or 'he didn’t bother calling/to call'. Both of these constructions are still used and have been for a long time, but there has been a steady shift over time from the 'to' to the '-ing' compliment.

    What do the changes mean?

    There are many other changes to the English language – what have you noticed? Have these changes affected your teaching or learning methods?

    Most contemporary linguistic commentators accept that change in language, like change in society, is inevitable. Some think that is regrettable, but others recognize it as a reinvigoration of a language, bringing alternatives that allow subtle differences of expression.

    Linguist, writer and lecturer David Crystal considers whether 'text speak' is undermining the English language. His response to the naysayers who claim it is damaging the English language is to point out that abbreviations have been around for a long time. While some, such as the ones we discussed above, are new, others, such as the use of 'u' for 'you' and the number 8 as a syllable in 'later', have been around for a century or more. Further to this, research shows that there is a correlation between the ability to use abbreviations and the ability to spell. After all, in order to abbreviate, you have to know which letters to abbreviate.

    As with everything, change isn’t necessarily a bad thing and, as the needs of English language users continue to change, so will the language.

    Fancy learning more about English? Check out our post 'How do English phrases travel across countries?'.

  • A  silohuette of a side profile of a womans head inside her head space is a ocean sunset

    Being bilingual can help keep your brain in good condition

    By Steffanie Zazulak

    Learning and understanding a new language is one of the most challenging things that your brain can do. But as well as the advantage of acquiring another language, it appears that the effort of giving your brain a good workout today by being bilingual could keep it in better condition in later life.

    Research led by Dr. Daniela Perani, a professor of psychology at in Milan, found that people who speak two or more languages seem to weather the ravages of Alzheimer’s disease better compared to people who have only mastered one language. Alzheimer’s is a progressive mental deterioration that can begin in middle or old age due to generalized brain degeneration.

    The study involved 85 people with Alzheimer’s – half of whom spoke both German and Italian and half who spoke only one language. The researchers found that bilingual patients had greater connectivity in key brain areas. This was especially in the part of the brain that governs “executive control” – a set of necessary behavioral cognitive processes that include problem-solving, working memory, reasoning and attentional control. The study also noted that the bilingual Alzheimer’s patients showed less severe symptoms of the disease.

    The study concluded: “Our findings suggest that the effects of speaking two languages are more powerful than both age and education in providing a protection against cognitive decline.”

    Bilingualism and the brain

    Although Alzheimer’s disease is currently incurable, the study supports a popular theory that people who have higher levels of education function longer with little manifestation of the illness. Part of the reason why bilingual brains may be better at resisting Alzheimer’s could be due to a lifetime of switching between languages daily.

    Learning and speaking more than one language changes how the brain carries out tasks that require focus and concentration on a certain piece of information without being distracted. It can also increase the density of white matter (connections) in the brain, meaning that there are more connections between brain parts, thus making this part of the brain more resistant to degeneration.

    This is supported by a study conducted by a team led by Professor Ana Inés Ansaldo at the , which suggests that bilingual people have more robust and more efficient brains compared to those who only speak one language. This is one of the reasons why a bilingual brain can be a buffer against aging and dementia.

    They recruited elderly people, half of whom spoke only one language and the other half who had learned a second language between the ages of 11 and 18. All performed equally well on a task that involved focusing on an object's color while ignoring its position, but brain scans revealed a big difference in how they processed the task.

    “While bilinguals were recruiting very specific brain areas and a small number of areas to perform the task, monolinguals were recruiting a much larger number of areas that were consuming much more resources. And the networks they were using were very, very complex,” says Professor Ansaldo. “That led us to think that the bilingual brain was more efficient in terms of the amount of resources that bilingual people require to do complex tasks as opposed to the monolingual brain.”

    The study concludes that bilingualism shapes the brain in a different way or how people approach complex tasks. It could be because bilinguals must inhibit the language they are not using to focus on the one that they are using.

  • A woman with glasses thinking with her hand to her mouth, stood in front of a pink background

    5 of the strangest English phrases explained

    By Steffanie Zazulak

    Here, we look at what some of the strangest English phrases mean – and reveal their origins…

    Bite the bullet

    Biting a bullet? What a strange thing to do! This phrase means you’re going to force yourself to do something unpleasant or deal with a difficult situation. Historically, it derives from the 19th century when a patient or soldier would clench a bullet between their teeth to cope with the extreme pain of surgery without anesthetic. A similar phrase with a similar meaning, “chew a bullet”, dates to the late 18th century.

    Use it: “I don’t really want to exercise today, but I’ll bite the bullet and go for a run.”

    Pigs might fly

    We all know that pigs can’t fly, so people use this expression to describe something that is almost certain never to happen. It is said that this phrase has been in use since the 1600s, but why pigs? An early version of the succinct “pigs might fly” was “pigs fly with their tails forward”, which is first found in a list of proverbs in the 1616 edition of John Withals’s English-Latin dictionary, A Shorte Dictionarie for Yonge Begynners: “Pigs fly in the ayre with their tayles forward.” Other creatures have been previously cited in similar phrases – “snails may fly”, “cows might fly”, etc, but it is pigs that have stood the test of time as the favored image of an animal that is particularly unsuited to flight! This phrase is also often used as a sarcastic response to mock someone’s credulity.

    Use it: “I might clean my bedroom tomorrow.” – “Yes, and pigs might fly.”

    Bob’s your uncle

    Even if you don’t have an uncle called Bob, you might still hear this idiom! Its origin comes from when Arthur Balfour was unexpectedly promoted to Chief Secretary for Ireland by the Prime Minister of Britain, Lord Salisbury, in 1900. Salisbury was Arthur Balfour’s uncle (possibly his reason for getting the job!) – and his first name was Robert. This phrase is used when something is accomplished or successful – an alternative to “…and that’s that”.

    Use it: “You’re looking for the station? Take a left, then the first right and Bob’s your uncle – you’re there!”

    Dead ringer

    This phrase commonly refers to something that seems to be a copy of something – mainly if someone looks like another person. The often-repeated story about the origin of this phrase is that many years ago, people were sometimes buried alive because they were presumed dead – when actually they were still alive. To prevent deaths by premature burial, a piece of string would supposedly be tied to the finger of someone being buried – and the other end would be attached to a bell above ground. If the person woke up, they would ring the bell – and the “dead” ringer would emerge looking exactly like someone buried only a few hours ago! Other stories point to the practice of replacing slower horses with faster horses – “ringers”. In this case, “dead” means “exact”.

    Use it: “That guy over there is a dead ringer for my ex-boyfriend.”

    Off the back of a lorry

    This is a way of saying that something was acquired that is probably stolen, or someone is selling something that’s stolen or illegitimate. It can also be used humorously to emphasize that something you bought was so cheap that it must have been stolen! “Lorry” is the British version – in the US, things fall off the back of “trucks”. An early printed version of this saying came surprisingly late in The Times in 1968. However, there are many anecdotal reports of the phrase in the UK from much earlier than that, and it is likely to date back to at least World War II. It’s just the sort of language that those who peddled illegal goods during and after WWII would have used.

    Use it: “I can’t believe these shoes were so cheap – they must have fallen off the back of a lorry.”