This is a guest blog post from Kasper Dam, CEO and founder of Kandio.
At Kandio, we publish online skill assessment test material from top experts so companies can pick the right candidate, agency, or freelancer for their project. Whether you’re hiring a Facebook Ads specialist to boost your sales, a freelancer to develop your new app idea, or a database expert to supercharge your website, our contributors can help you to recruit better people.
It wasn’t always like this. We used to write the skill assessment test material ourselves. This material consists of a series of small challenges that help to identify the best candidates and eliminate bias. After all, hiring the wrong people can be painful and, even, devastating to a business.
Writing high-quality assessment material isn’t easy and hiring to cover all topics clients might need is tedious, expensive, and time-consuming. And our clients and leads were asking us, “Who writes your assessment content? Why is your content better at screening candidates? Can my team develop the content ourselves?”
That forced us to evolve as a business, rethink our strategy, and level-up our product. Using Podio and Citrix RightSignature, we created in 12 months a vast contributor universe for candidate and pre-employment assessments.
We built a powerful Podio engine that helps structure and automate complex processes and phases. In this post, we’ll look at how we built it to help us deliver industry-leading skill assessment test materials.
Connecting with the Right People
First, we needed a way to connect with industry-leading experts in specific verticals who could deliver on the “expert topics” our clients demand. The list is continually evolving to ensure we are always working on the topics our clients request the most.
The table below lists our accumulated contributor prospects across different categories of expertise, as well as how close a certain test is to being live.
How do we connect with contributors? We scour the places they’re hanging out and publishing other material. And we look for experts who are recognized for their excellence and for their ability to teach others. This leads us to publishing, learning, and knowledge-sharing platforms like Github, Stack Overflow, Udemy, and more.
We created scripts that scrape these sites for information on potential contributors and used Podio to organize the data so we always know who’s trending, who’s respected, and most of all, who’s likely to be the best fit for us.
Our contributor prospect app, shown below, includes an Authority Score, which acts as an internal metric and is calculated from a combination of metrics like book ratings, published books, Twitter followers, course students, and online reputation score. This has become our bible when it comes to identifying the right contributors.
Outreach
There’s not really a way to automate this step effectively. Top experts get tons of offers for new business across their channels, so we took a more personalized approach, where we:
- Do our homework
- Reach out to promising prospects
- Follow up extensively
- Reach out on several channels
- Be on-point and direct
- Be personal and well prepared
- Act quickly and be responsive (because you won’t get a second chance)
Signing a Contract
Once we have a “verbal” agreement with a contributor, it’s time to sign a contract. We use Formstack Documents because our document needs are complex and require a significant amount of data, calculations, and design. If you want to get going quickly from within the Podio ecosystem, the logical choice is Podio workflow automation, which offers excellent PDF generation functionality. In our case, the contract is sent for review to our contributor, who signs with Citrix RightSignature.
Content Development
The next phase is the content development and content quality assurance (QA) process.
We use Podio to track the status of our contributors’ work. Above, on the left, you’ll see our process on the contributors’ test material (left), as well as our contributor profile (right) That essentially serves as the cornerstone of our marketing initiatives around the contributor once the test goes live. Two profile previews of reputable contributors are shown below.
Steve “Ardalis” Smith, founder of Ardalis, and longtime Microsoft MVP, who wrote our tests on ASP.NET MVC and C# and .NET.
And Paul Randal, who is CEO and founder of SQLskills.com, a much sought-after SQL server consulting/SQL server training company.
After a contributor profile is published, we’ll receive a first draft of their actual skill assessment content.
Like our promotional profile, we use Podio to connect the dots for content inspiration, grammar, visual design, review, QA, and more. Below is an example test assessment question so you can see the finished product.
Right from the moment of the contract signature, we start to look forward to our test launch. It’s always thrilling to debut a new online assessment test that our clients have requested. And it’s also exciting for our contributors, who worked hard on bringing the online assessment test to market. Below are two online assessment tests live in our test catalog.
Assessment Content and User Feedback
Candidates sometimes have feedback, comments, or other input on the skill-assessment test they’ve taken. Our assessment platform has a direct link to Podio, so all input from candidates go into our Podio workflow and are assigned to the right person for analysis. Below is an example of a candidate providing feedback on one of our assessment questions.
Reporting and Payment
The final stage is our monthly reporting and payment process. We use a custom app to merge a range of data and metrics into a monthly reporting sheet and send it to our contributors with Podio workflow automation so they can see how their online assessment test is performing and get insights into how they can improve the test and earn more. We also have an app that handles and organizes our commission payments for contributors who reach a minimum threshold.
An Ever-Evolving Project
Kandio’s contributor universe is more comprehensive (and in many ways more complex) than we thought it would be, and it’s an ever-evolving project. But looking at it today, it was all worth it. With Podio as the anchor, we were able to bring together a variety of apps, web services, and suppliers to engage top experts and deliver industry-leading skills assessment test content.
I have been a part of the Citrix partner network for five years, and this is by far the most impressive thing I have been a part of building with Podio. Let us know if you want to learn more or build something similar. We’re happy to share any material or lessons learned. And share your questions or feedback in the comments below or connect with me on LinkedIn.
