Reed is one of the UK's leading recruitment specialists, dealing with permanent, temporary and contract work. The company has developed a range of assessments, using Questionmark Perception, which are available to job seekers over the Internet. The management and hosting of the new services is being carried out by Questionmark from its offices in the US.

The new system aims to enable Reed to assess the skills of job seekers and then match them to suitable vacancies. In this way, they will offer candidates and clients a better service through more accurate placement of candidates.

Mark Williams, head of assessment for Reed, comments, "We are constantly looking for ways of improving our service to both clients and candidates. The ability to carry out skills and personality assessments means that we can learn more about our candidates, and pass this information on to potential employers. The facility to perform these tests over the Internet provides that extra degree of flexibility to all parties and opens our reach even further."

In 1999 Reed began looking for a tool that would provide the flexibility and ease of use to enable the in-house design and development of tests. It was important that the chosen product offered a variety of innovative methods of posing questions rather than just multiple choice options. Having looked around for some time, Reed met with Questionmark and decided to trial Perception.

The first move was to develop a pilot system that would measure the level of interest from candidates for Internet assessments. It soon became clear that demand was high and that the system was worth testing further.

Williams comments, "The online testing pilot is still on-going and it has been widely used by our current candidates. We have outsourced the Perception online tests to Questionmark which is hosting the system on its servers in the US and is managing the tests from there."

Another area where Questionmark has worked with Reed is in developing personality questionnaires. The programming for this was commissioned to Questionmark and has been delivered in the form of a software patch for the Reed system. This module will enable Reed to assess the personality traits of candidates to supplement the skill levels elicited from other assessments.

Looking to the future, Reed is looking at developing online applications forms with Perception. These could be used to provide almost instant feedback to both clients and candidates about the job-seeker's suitability for a particular role.

Williams concludes, "As with any organisation, it is important that we are responsive to our customer. We need to differentiate ourselves and online assessments can give us a competitive edge. Online assessment tools will allow us to give more timely and accurate feedback to employers and job seekers, helping us to deliver an improved level of service to our customers."

Questionmark was founded in the UK in 1988 and was one of the first software companies to provide an authoring framework to create tests and assessments to run on PCs. Today the company offers a full range of software for the testing and assessment marketplace spanning Windows 3.X and 95, DOS, Macintosh and web environments. Businesses, governments, and universities in over 40 countries now use Questionmark software.