Why Qpercom is top of the class for remote assessment

by | Feb 11, 2021

After 12 years in business, Qpercom launched its latest product in 2020 in direct response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Video was added to our advanced assessment tool Observe to allow higher education institutions and volume recruitment agencies (or HR departments) to organise Multi-Mini-Interviews as a valid and reliable tool to hire new staff remotely or to run clinical exams or admission interviews for medical and healthcare students.
To help with proctoring and invigilation, a monitoring, control and watch tab was introduced to help organisations monitor, control and watch the progress during the assessment, recruitment or admission process.

For the progress made by Qpercom, we were delighted to receive accreditation as the ‘Best In Class for Remote Assessment’ from the All Ireland Business Foundation in early 2021 with Kieran Ring, Deputy Chair, Adjudication Board of the All Ireland Business Foundation saying:

Qpercom are uniquely positioned to enable recruiters in any setting to interview and asses candidates while reducing administration, increasing accuracy & improving validity. Qpercom is truly a digital solution for a digital age.”

If you are still looking for a digital platform that can manage video interviews and choose the best candidates every time, here are some reasons why Qpercom is your best option.

Candidate Selection In Any Setting

Qpercom was founded to enhance paper-based clinical skills assessments that have been organised since 1975 in medical and health sciences schools. In Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCE)  and Multi-Mini-Interviews (MMI), students demonstrate clinical and non-technical competencies in a series of consecutive stations (where candidates are interviewed or engage in a practical assessment). It’s a valid and reliable assessment approach in Medicine, Nursing, Paramedic, Dentistry training and also used in higher education admissions interviews.

In recent years, this format of assessment and candidate selection has expanded into other industries, like public sector recruitment. Witnessing its effectiveness in choosing the best candidate every time, Qpercom now advocates for its use in any recruitment setting that requires mass interviews.

We use it ourselves. The MMI approach was used to hire AWS cloud infrastructure engineer Samuel Vishal Nathan (in-person MMI) and sales executive Kylee Fort (remote MMI) assessed on different competencies in different stations by Qpercom staff. It’s data-driven approach to selecting the best candidate(s) from a large group of applicants excludes any doubt from the candidate selection process so organisations can be confident they’ve made the right choice. 

Interview And Assess Candidates Remotely

Qpercom has put proven assessment methodology back on the video conferencing agenda as companies moved from face-to-face interviews to video interviews due to the COVID-19 pandemic. When we noticed that our clients were setting up single interviews on Zoom, MS Teams or Google Meet every time they wanted to assess a candidate, we added a video feature to our assessment platform to offer a solution for more efficient and accurate assessment by allowing candidates to go through a series of stations rather than just 1 station.

But an important feature was still missing.

The Multiple Mini Interview concept recognises that the similarities between interviewing and assessing candidates and interviewing and assessing patients in a medical setting are clear. Dr Thomas Kropmans’s experience as a trained pediatric physiotherapist, human movement scientist and educationalist meant that  when his partner recently received a call from her specialist registrar orthopedic surgeon, for a ‘call’ rather than a visit to the hospital, the penny dropped. He asked his partner: “Did he mean a video call to assess you remotely or ‘just a phone call’? Confused, she said: “he mentioned that he wasn’t sure yet, as not all patients would have the opportunity to do video calls.”

Dr Kropmans wondered; how would a video assessment conducted with Qpercom handle a traditional doctor/patient video call that might require the sharing of data or documents to paint a complete picture?

One piece of the puzzle was a lack of functionality for sharing these important documents that might be vital to the interaction.

A Media Manager function was added, allowing the upload of text; video; and picture files for participants in the video station. The patient could share any recordings from her/his phone (gait recording, pain locations, outcomes of approved health apps) and the medic could not only interview the patient but also share X-ray images, ultrasound recordings, lab results etc. and complete his history form to be added to his e-patient record through the Observe API (Application Programming Interface). Following the ideas of interprofessional healthcare, a physiotherapist or mental health professional or any other healthcare professional could join the scenario to make it a multi-station assessment. 

Remote assessment on any device

Reducing Administration, Increasing Accuracy & Improving Validity

Since its foundation in 2008, Qpercom has been the choice of global universities and recruitment organisations for its ability to reduce administration; increase accuracy and improve validity of their assessments. However, the fact that all assessment data is retrieved, stored and analysed electronically creates opportunities for data analysis by third parties. While higher education institutions use Qpercom data to publish quality assurance analysis and research data, recruitment clients like Oleeo, SSCL and Hicom for HEE use Qpercom software for their assessments. The Work Psychology Group is validating their findings for the Situational Judgement Test for the National School of Healthcare Sciences.

A Digital Solution For A Digital Age

After being accredited by the All-Ireland Business Foundation as ‘Best in Class for Remote Assessment’ on 4th of February 2021, CEO Dr Thomas Kropmans pointed to the opportunities that the pandemic had created for Qpercom.

 

“We saw the potential in the very early stages of the pandemic and gave up our offices in Galway. We recruited two new members of staff using MMIs (first physical and then remotely) and we encouraged remote online collaboration between our team and clients. We also shared our insights at several online conferences and we found this to be more effective and better than trying to make an impact at a physical conference” said Dr Kropmans.

He continued, “We hope early adopters in other industries step on board and adopt our digital solution for assessment and mass recruitment”.

“We passed the point of no return and with the Business All Star acknowledgement we are available to share our expertise here in Ireland or further afield, as we already do with some of our clients in Europe, Asia, North America and Australia”.

Watch Qpercom receive Business All-Stars accreditation 2021 for ‘Best In Class Remote Assessment:

Interested in Qpercom’s Remote Assessment platform? Drop us a message below.

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Technology can:

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