The hiring process of each business will depend mostly on their resources. While there’s no general, surefire approach to ensure that you’ll recruit top talents, there are tools that’ll help you narrow down your search.
What Are Pre-Employment Testing?
Depending on the type of test being used, pre-employment tests can gauge a wide range of useful and necessary data to help your recruiters hire the most suitable candidate for the vacant position.
For instance, aptitude assessments are designed to identify the applicant’s propensity to succeed in a certain activity. It’s also used to evaluate their abilities through an array of testing formats. The results of this test will then be used to correlate their chances of thriving in the new role. On the other hand, a personality test gives you an insight into the employee’s behavioral inclinations, traits, interaction style, and more.
All of these can be valuable in setting expectations, understanding the employee’s behavior in certain work-related situations, and for placement purposes. Apart from the two, there are also job knowledge tests, emotional intelligence tools, cognitive ability exams, and more.
For some companies, pre-employment tests come before the interview, while for others, it goes after the interview. Depending on your intentions, pre-employment tools can certainly benefit your company in a plethora of ways.
Reasons Behind Pre-Employment Tools
Considering all these, you might wonder whether or not pre-employment assessments will be useful in achieving your company goals. If you’re in doubt, you’re in the right place. Below are the reasons your company should conduct pre-employment testing.
1. Offers High Level Of Objectivity
No matter how much professionalism you display during the hiring process, you still got some level of bias. This is especially true if you have candidates whom you’re rooting for during the recruitment process.
While traditional methods to know job-seekers are to screen their resumes and conduct interviews, both of these might not be reliable or sufficient. For instance, an aspirant’s resume might have misleading information. Unless you’re going to call one of their references or do a background check, you won’t be able to know if the information in their resume is accurate.
On the other hand, unstructured interviews are subjective. This informal type of interview may allow your recruiters to ask various questions to gauge the applicant’s competence. However, hiring employees based on gut feel or personal opinions isn’t simply reliable.
Validated pre-employment test kits are objective tools that’ll help you collect useful data from candidates to make informed hiring decisions. Since these are all standardized, they can offer you reliable results across all applicants who’ll take the tests.
Unlike skimming resumes and interviews alone, these sets of tests have well-developed metrics to predict whether or not the applicant is the best fit for the role. Also, the concrete results will ultimately help you decide whether or not a certain applicant should advance to the next stage of the process.
2. Helps You Reach A Consensus
Going back to the first point, pre-employment tests will help supplement the gathered data from the applicant’s resume and the interview. Alternatively, the results can also challenge the results of either traditional method.
For instance, a candidate might score high in the interview but low in the skill criterion of the aptitude test. Take note that if you’re hiring a manager, they’re required to have the right skills to succeed in the job.
More so, because your hiring team consists of different people, they’ll most likely have various views regarding a certain applicant. Fortunately, the pre-employment results can be used to put an end to the disagreements and finalize their decision.
3. Saves You Time And Money
Hiring unsuitable candidates can have a real impact on your company. For one, it can double up the costs as you might have to send them to extensive training or move them to another department. If either of these won’t work, you might have to go back to square one and hire another person for the vacant role.
Since recruiting and hiring employees are quite expensive and time-consuming, you eventually have to look for tools to narrow down the search and speed up the hiring process.
Pre-employment assessments are objective and reliable, which can help your hiring managers filter a large pool of candidates and come up with a handful of prospects. These can potentially take off the burden from your recruiters and help you save money in the long haul. It’s an efficient and cost-effective way to find the perfect employee for the vacant position.
Wrapping It Up
Your employees are your biggest asset. Considering this, it’s important to recruit the best talents, create a pool of potential candidates from them, and hire the most suitable ones for your business.
Conducting pre-employment tests during the hiring process will serve your company in a plethora of ways. Aside from the fact that the results can help you make informed decisions, pre-employment software can also affect the long-term success of your company.
