Are you trying to hire the perfect candidate? How do you find out if someone will be the right person for the job?
Every company aims to hire the best talent based on their budget and needs. But, it’s not uncommon for applicants to include vague or misleading statements in their resumes. Some even go as far as to lie during interviews while trying to impress you.
The struggle is real. It’s very hard today to eliminate the bad apples in a pool of applicants. This is why almost 60% of companies ask applicants to prove their worth prior to investing in them.
How do they do this? They use pre-hire testing to find the best candidate for the job. Keep reading to find out how these tools work and why you might need them.
How Do Skills Assessment Tools work?
Pre-employment skill assessments are conducted by using various tests and questionnaires to screen the many candidates at different stages of the hiring process.
These tests can be for anything from language proficiency to work skills to personality traits. In a world where nearly half of the resumes include lies, these assessments are the one sure way to find the right candidate for a job.
A tool created for this specific purpose will help you not only create, but also customize and implement tests for your candidates. The process can be lengthy and complicated without them. A good pre-employment skills assessment tool will streamline the entire process, read the results, and show you which candidates bring the most promise for your company.
Types of Assessments
The list of tests you can implement in the hiring process is endless. Even so, there are 4 key categories of tests that everyone should consider for their business:
- Technical tests
- Psychometric tests
- Behavioral tests
- Job simulations
Let’s take a look at these in more detail
Technical Tests
For starters, you want to know if the candidate is able to do the job you hire them to do. Technical tests will analyze their knowledge in a specific domain such as accounting, IT, sales, etc. Let’s say you’re hiring an accountant. You want to test their accounting knowledge. You can do this in no time by using ready accounting tests from the TestGorilla assessment tool. This particular test will evaluate the candidate’s knowledge of accounting concepts, and tell you how able they are to manage your financial records.
Psychometric Tests
Psychometric tests will measure the aspects of human personality to tell you if the candidate is a good match. These are positive personality, dark personality, motivations, preferences, values, and cognitive abilities.
Behavioral Tests
Often implemented in the first stages of the hiring process, these tests measure the candidate’s behavioral competencies such as their personality traits and skills.
Job simulations
Job simulations will tell you how the candidate thinks on their feet. You can do these online or during the interview stage, or to save time, use hiring assessment tools. Just send the assessment to the candidates and give them an example of a situation that happens in your business – and ask them how they’d handle it.
These tests can be applied in any business and for every position you’re hiring for. Depending on who you are looking for and what you need them to possess, you can also implement coding tests, language skill tests, etc.
Benefits of Pre-Employment Skills Assessments
Now on to the most important question – why should you invest your money and time into these assessments? The most significant benefits of using a tool to implement these tests are:
Objectivity
If you want to hire the right person, you need to be objective. Assessment tools give you this luxury. You can rely on objective data thanks to standardized questions.
Unlike interviews, pre-employment tests will allow you to assess the different skills and traits of each candidate. You can use the insights to predict an individual’s job performance and decide if they are a good company fit.
Depending on what the role requires, you can test for cognitive abilities, confidence, subject-area knowledge, leadership skills, initiative, honesty, reliability, empathy, and much more.
Better Employee Retention
Hiring the wrong person is expensive. SHRM’s research suggests that it costs 50% to 60% to replace an employee with overall costs going up to 200% of their yearly salary. That alone should be a reason enough for you to conduct tests during the hiring phase.
Pre-employment assessment will help you screen the candidates for personality and aptitude and assess if they are likely to fit into your company’s culture. Technical tests will show you if they will do their job well and how much you’ll need to invest in training.
Legal Defensibility
Companies can be held liable for hiring with bias. Pre-employment tests make you more objective and remove hiring bias that occurs during the hiring process. Even if this is done unintentionally, bias can cost your company its reputation and a small fortune. With the results from tests in hand, you have a good legal defense if someone questions the legality of your hiring process.
Besides helping your organization find out how skilled a candidate is, pre-employment testing will also enhance the equitability, objectivity, and fairness of your hiring managers. Every company today should strive to use legally compliant, equitable employee promotion and selection practices.
As long as the tests are used for hiring purposes, their data is your proof that you weren’t biased when hiring a candidate.
Efficient Hiring Process
On average, smart recruiting takes 42 days to be completed. This includes posting the ad for the job, screening resumes, conducting interviews, doing pre-employment assessments, and onboarding.
Now imagine having to do it all over again just because you picked the wrong person. Or, imagine lengthening this already long process just because it takes you a long time to screen each candidate.
Yes, this number is very accurate. The Center for Economic and Business Research found that only 43% of job openings are filled within the first month. The rest are likely to stay open for another 3 months or longer.
We cannot say that this is because of a lack of applicants. For every online posting, there are hundreds of resumes being submitted. Recruiters sure have their hands full. Very often, the reason why they don’t hire anyone in months is that they cannot evaluate the candidates properly.
This is where assessment tools come in handy. With pre-employment tests, you can screen hundreds of applicants in a very short time and without much effort. The tests will be administered at the level you want, the results will be automatically checked, and you’ll get your best candidates picked out from the crowd.
How to Streamline Hiring Processes
We already mentioned that you can use various tests at different stages. But, how will you know which test to conduct at a different stage of the hiring process?
To help you streamline the process, here is a good example of what smart testing can do for you.
The Early Stages
You can require that applicants take tests at different stages. If you implement some tests early on, this will weed out ‘resume spammers’. These are people who send out their resumes everywhere they can without giving it any thought.
Chances are, a person who has sent the same resume to 100 places will not sit down to do an assessment. This will weed out the people who aren’t serious about the position they are applying for.
Later in the Hiring Process
Then, proceed to test the candidates at later stages to determine how skilled they are. This will reduce the number of applicants significantly too, and you can easily see who lied in their resumes.
Set minimum cutoff scores for some tests. What will you achieve by doing this?
Well, this will narrow down the number of candidates that you’ll interview. It takes over half an hour to conduct a single interview, and reducing at least a few of them will save your hiring managers valuable time.
The Final Stages
And, of course, you can test the final candidates for their personality skills, and behavior to see who would be the right fit for your company. If an applicant is clearly not a fit for your company culture, they are highly likely to abandon you in the first couple of months. No matter how qualified they are, these are not smart hires.
Reflection
If you are dealing with high employee turnover, are unhappy with the people you hired, or find hiring to be an exhausting, never-ending process, you are doing it wrong. This doesn’t have to take forever or take all of your time. Thanks to pre-employment skills assessment tools, the process will be faster, cost-effective, safer, and more productive.
Nadica Metuleva is a senior freelance writer with 8+ years of experience in producing original, high-quality content for clients. She has a Master’s degree in English Literature and Teaching and speaks 4 languages. Nadica has a passion for storytelling and a deep understanding of SEO principles. You can find her samples and more details about her work on LinkedIn.
