Imagine you want a psychometric assessment of 3500 employees. What do you need?

In 2013: 25 psychologists and students and 5 months of work.

Today: 1 psychologist and 5 working days.

This is exactly what Selekcija.hr enables – a much faster and cheaper psychometric testing of job candidates or employees, with much greater assessment certainty. The company became a reality from the idea that written tests and their correction should be automated and, therefore, accelerated. Especially psychometric tests during job interviews – not clinical ones, of course! These tests assess how dynamic, proactive, conscientious, thorough, stress-resistant, or team-oriented someone is. Slobodan Jović, the company director, had this idea for some time. However, he needed a programmer to implement it.

An opportunity to hire one presented itself in an unusual way. In April 2015, during a job interview with one candidate, he learned that her husband was a programmer who had given up looking for a job and was working as a delivery driver because the big IT companies didn’t want him. Slobodan was immediately interested and invited the programmer in question for a psychological test, even though the man was a bit insecure about his expertise. Why? Because smart people know how much they don’t know, which is why they sometimes appear insecure. The test results were so good that Slobodan hired him immediately despite his lack of experience.

You might wonder who this man is? It is Dragan Prljić, the co-founder of Selekcija.hr, who developed software for the Selekcija.hr platform back in 2015. The software that is still used today.

In the crisis year, they had the largest number of new employees

As a company, they were officially founded in 2016, and little by little the number of employees was growing, and in the crisis of 2021, they had the largest number of new employees.

“Today we have 13 employees – a young and cheerful team that loves its job!”

They are also a great example of one of the great advantages of online testing – it is easy to access from any part of Croatia because it does not require physical presence at company premises. The company is located in Split, however, the team comes from Tomislavgrad, Zadar, Kaštela, Makarska, Rijeka, Đakovo, Split, and they also have a colleague in Zenica.

“Our greatest success is customer satisfaction, and we often ask clients for feedback about our work. Many clients praised the simplicity and ease of digitized access to the selection process we provided during the pandemic. Therefore, the pandemic has left a positive mark on our business because it has helped speed up all automation processes and increase system efficiency.”

We want to help everyone in HR to focus on people

The Selekcija.hr team says that their vision is to make human resource management simple:

“We make it easier for HR teams to assess candidates and/or employees, as well as simplify the administrative and repetitive tasks.”

In addition, they are working to enable new, innovative psychological tests that will more than match the existing ones in terms of quality.

“Perhaps we were the first in the world, together with the Department of Psychology of the Zagreb University (FFZG), to issue a personality questionnaire based solely on the assessment of photographs, the so-called. Photo5 test. We are certainly the first in the region that have released the Adaptive Cognitive Abilities Test. This test, depending on the solution of the first task and according to Item-Response theory and the set algorithm, offers a tailored next task whose complexity is adjusted to the candidate. This makes the test faster and more accurate in evaluating cognitive capabilities of job candidates or employees.”

This was also recognized by the Croatian Chamber of Psychology which enabled them to become authorized test publishers in 2018.

What remains the same are the challenges, more precisely how to automate the selection process as much as possible. The current goal is to improve the expert system, one of the most challenging projects so far. This system independently evaluates candidates based on the results of cognitive tests, personality questionnaires, and CVs and assesses their ‘fit’ with the job they have applied for.

“Future projects are aimed at even greater automation of the selection process, but also onboarding – training systems and performance monitoring, as well as the internationalization of the system.”

About connecting with the local community

“Connecting with the local community is extremely important to us; we like to share our knowledge and attract new people to the human resources business. We recently organized education for students in Split, and we are planning the next one soon, this time in Zagreb. Also, we won a special award “Be a role model 2020” at the international exhibition of innovations, prototypes, and business plans.

We are also happy that we have become a member of the Split Tech City community, and we are looking forward to future collaborations!”