How to Test Skills in Remote Interviews
TLDR: Testing skills in remote interviews means getting past what candidates say about themselves. A pre-employment test shows you what a video call can’t. Start with the core task the job requires, keep conditions the same for every candidate, and use the test as a reality check on the interview.
Most hiring managers don’t test skills in remote interviews at all.
The video call goes well, reference checks out, and the decision gets made on how someone described their own experience. That’s taking a big bet, just on the hope they’re telling the truth.
A few weeks in, their manager calls: invoices processed wrong, basic tasks taking three times as long as they should. Interviewed well, but the job is a different story.
Remote hiring can make this happen more frequently. On a video call, candidates are in their own space with access to anything they’d want to reference. A strong communicator (or someone who’s using AI in real time during the interview) can talk about QuickBooks for twenty minutes without ever opening it.
A skills test gives you more visibility to what you’re looking at.
What a video call actually tells you
A good video interview tells you real things. Communication style, how someone handles a question they weren’t ready for, whether their “vibes” fit the team. Those things matter.
What it can’t show you is whether they can do the job. Asking ‘how proficient are you with Excel?’ is different from watching someone use it.
Interview answers show confidence. A skills test shows the real deal. In remote hiring especially, those two can be further apart than you’d expect, because interviews reward people who speak confidently about their experience.
In-person interviews used to include something practical almost by accident. A walkthrough of a system, a quick task, a minute of watching someone work. Remote hiring didn’t replace that with anything. Instead, it just added more calls.
Start with accounting
Accounting hiring is where this shows up clearly because the evidence arrives fast. A new hire who overstates their accounts payable experience isn’t caught in the interview.
They’re caught when invoices come back wrong, when reconciliations need to be redone, when a task that should take an hour takes most of the day.
A test session covering accounting math, accounts payable processing, QuickBooks proficiency, and financial reasoning gives you something the interview couldn’t: a score you can verify.
The comparison is often the most valuable part: two candidates with matching resumes and equally polished interviews can perform very differently on tests. That difference is worth knowing before you hire. For a full breakdown of how to approach accounting candidates specifically, our article about screening accounting staff covers the details.
It’s also a useful gut check on your own instincts. Your strongest candidate might test poorly on the actual skills the job requires. That’s better to know now.
The same approach works with any job with a measurable core skill. The test just has to match what the position actually requires day to day.
Where Most Employers Go Wrong
20 years of working with HR managers and employers reveal a lot.
The most common pattern: employers test for some jobs but not others. Whole categories of jobs get skipped, usually because someone decided testing wasn’t worth the effort for that position.
The jobs that get skipped tend to be the ones where a consistent baseline matters most. Cognitive ability and behavioral tests are valuable for almost any entry-to-mid-level role, not just specialized positions. Employers who recognize that build a consistent standard. Everyone else is guessing job by job.
The whole point of a consistent test is comparison. A candidate who interviews smoothly and scores well tells you something.
| In our 20 years, we’ve seen this happen a lot: Hiring manager wants to test, but HR doesn’t want to bother. Those managers pay the price with a lower-quality hire.
Ken Crowell, Founder, EmployTest |
Matching the Test to the Job
Admin support: typing speed and accuracy, attention to detail, and basic software proficiency. Actual scores, not self-assessments of how careful they are.
Customer-facing jobs: a customer service assessment. It puts candidates in actual scenarios rather than asking them to describe how they’d handle one. For jobs that are primarily email or chat, an office grammar test is worth layering in on top.
Operations and logistics: Math reasoning and attention to detail. These predict performance in ways a resume won’t show you.
Fully remote candidates: a remote work assessment covers the specific habits and skills that predict success in that environment.
Entry-level jobs: a general skills assessment gives you a broad baseline across several areas at once without having to pick a single narrow measure.
The interview and the tests work best as a pair. For the decision itself, running a virtual interview covers how to structure it so both pieces complement each other.
Remote hiring changed the format. The standard for a good hire didn’t move. You’re still looking for someone who can do the job, and a skills test is one of the fastest ways to find out if they can. Start with a free sample test for the role you’re filling right now and build from there.
