And I totally agree with you about the need for basic skills. It’s crucial and will take people much further than they could go without them.

Keep up the great blogging!

@Ron Frank, Thanks for joining the discussion! Hopefully you realize I wasn’t attacking Aquent, I enjoy working with your company. I think your tests are fair and well rounded but I know people who are great at what they do, yet don’t do so well when tested. Thats not exactly Aquent’s fault at all. My point was that young freelancers need to prepare themselves for these scenarios…where they should be able to fall back on basic skills to get them by in structured environments where they can’t Google all the answers.

Regarding what you’ve said about our skill assessments, I would just like to clarify a few points. First off, we don’t work only with people who “pass” or do well on our skill assessments. There are many roles for which we represent talent that may not require expertise in software. Certainly at the c-level positions but also in some of the Art Director or Creative Director positions. Some markets, some clients, care more about other skills for those roles than someone’s proficiency in InDesign, for example. Also, if someone only does okay on an assessment, there may very well be clients who need someone to come in and do some not-so-complex work on a website or magazine layout. The company may have no need for a high-end developer, nor might they have the budget for someone like that.

When you say the assessment does not measure “talent,” I hope you are referring to design skills and not software skills. Certainly, we do not assess design skills with tests — while there are some objective measures for that (like ROI) — it can really become subjective and that would not be fair to the talent especially. We prefer to review a talent’s design work through her portfolio pieces.

As for measuring software skills, most people seem to think we do an awfully good job at that. (Though we are always trying to improve.) One thing we’ve mastered on that front is the fact that our assessments require the talent to work in the actual software — it’s not multiple choice. This actually goes a long way towards measuring someone’s skills in Dreamweaver or Photoshop. Someone might be able to tell me that using Color Range or Extract are good ways to silhouette a furry animal from it’s background, but having them actually use the tool, or combination of tools, is so much more informative.

Lastly, I’d like to clarify that the impetus for our assessments is making the best match between a talent and a client. It is not at all that we are “corporate” and concerned with being “embarrassed.” We simply want to find the best paying and most interesting jobs we can for our talent. And we want the companies to which we send our talent to have a wonderful experience, meet their deadline, and feel they paid a fair price. To do this, along with the portfolio review, reference checking, and one-on-one interview, we develop assessments in order to see how well talent know the software they say they know. Without that major variable, how could we know which talent to send out on a job requiring a Photoshopper who knows spot-colors vs. another one who knows collaging techniques?

Just because someone’s resume says they’re an expert in Photoshop, I’m sure you’ll agree, that doesn’t mean they really are one. And that’s not because they trying to lie. It’s often because so many people simply don’t know what they don’t know. If I didn’t know as much as I do about Photoshop, I might think that just because I’ve been using it since 1990 that I’m an expert in it. But I do know what I don’t know — and that’s about 97% of the program. So I’d never say I’m an expert. But a lot of people don’t know what they don’t know and that causes a lot of confusion.

And you can’t tell someone’s software skills from his portfolio either. I’ve seen plenty of amazing designers use InDesign or QuarkXPress (or PageMaker) to create documents that are disastrous to edit later on. With multiple tabs in a row or spaces to get text to align, or 10s of text frames when only one or two are needed. Yet the portfolio looks wonderful.

So we develop hands-on skill assessments. And we’ve been improving them since we started when we were MacTemps and only had offices in about eight cities. We were small back then, but realized that multiple choice testing was not good enough. But like I said earlier, we are always trying to improve the way we do things here at Aquent and if you, or other readers of this blog, have suggestions, I’m all ears and would truly love to hear some feedback.

Ron Frank
Skill Assessment Developer
Aquent