Organizations are increasingly deploying pre-employment tests in the hiring process to screen candidates efficiently. These are standardized assessments that help evaluate candidates, and their behavior, personality, and skills. With the use of pre-employment tests, companies can significantly reduce time-to-fill and improve hire quality. It helps quickly weeding out the unqualified candidates and pushes the right hire further down the recruitment funnel. With the correct administration of these tests, employers can make informed hiring decisions.
Pre-employment tests help employers learn about various aspects of prospective employees. It helps gather relevant information to understand if a candidate has the required caliber to fulfill the requirements of a particular industry and role requirements. Leveraging pre-employment tests makes the employee recruitment process more manageable and helps reduce the risk of a bad hire. A bad hire can significantly impact a company’s bottom line. A bad hiring decision tends to affect several areas of a business: morale, customer service, even brand reputation.
Implementing pre-employment tests helps to capture a candidate’s value proposition efficiently. It uses a data-driven approach and helps leverage hiring decisions by enabling employers to consider a candidate’s proven capabilities. To streamline the recruitment process, companies can onboard pre-employment testing software into their hiring platform. This software helps to generate standardized and objective tests to make hiring decisions faster, easier, and bias-free.
It helps quickly assess and identify qualified talent and screen candidates for personality, aptitude, and skills. Organizations can also use it to evaluate candidates’ soft skills, such as organization, communication, problem-solving, and motivation. When choosing a pre-employment testing software for your business, ensure that it includes robust reporting tools to sort, compare, and analyze candidate results.
Software solutions that provide real-time results and reports will help you efficiently identify ideal candidates faster. Check if the software system integrates with applicant tracking systems (ATS) solutions to ease results management. It will boost efficiency during the hiring process and reduce turnaround time. Pre-employment tests offer the best predictive value to test a candidate’s suitability for the concerned job position.
Critical issues in using pre-employment tests
Pre-employment tests are objective, and it guarantees bias-free and optimum candidate experience. But these tests must deliver on the following issues to unlock maximum benefits. When implementing pre-employment tests, companies must ensure that the tests are:
1. Valid
Before deploying the pre-employment tests, you need to assess their validity. The most important types of validity-supporting evidence include: criterion validity, content validity, and construct validity. Validity helps measure the degree to which the test conclusions will remain relevant and accurate. It helps to identify if the test can accurately measure and predict a candidate’s future job performance or success.
2. Reliable
The reliability factor enables the stakeholder to gauge the consistency with which a test measures an item. It should be convenient, accurate, reliable, and competitively priced.
3. Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO)
Pre-employment tests should meet legal and regulatory criteria and professional standards. Companies must ensure that these tests meet all EEO laws before administering the tests.
Why use pre-employment testing and assessment in the hiring process
Pre-employment testing and assessment in the hiring process offers some benefits to companies.
1. Objective
Relying on objective data helps to make better hiring decisions. Pre-employment tests are standardized, reliable, and effective methods of identifying a candidate’s suitability. It helps evaluate a candidate for required KSAOs (knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics). You can use these tests to assess various attributes of a candidate, such as cognitive ability, strategic thinking, leadership skills, honesty, and more.
2. Increase employee retention
Companies must ensure talent retention and reduce turnover rates. With pre-employment tests, employers can screen candidates more efficiently, filter out unsuitable candidates, and determine which candidate will turn out to be the most promising potential employee. It helps ensure that a particular candidate will deliver the right cultural fit. Pre-employment tests also help to provide a holistic, engaging, and informative hiring experience to candidates.
3. Increase legal defensibility
Pre-employment testing also helps in increasing the legal defensibility of the hiring process. Since it leverages an objective and scientifically validated hiring process, these tests have an additional layer of legal defensibility instead of subjective hiring.
Types of pre-employment tests
Pre-employment tests are of different kinds.
1. Aptitude tests
Aptitude tests help measure a candidate’s critical thinking and problem-solving skills and gauge their ability to learn, understand, and apply new information.
2. Personality tests
Personality tests help gain insights into a candidate’s interaction style and behavioral tendencies in a work environment.
3. Integrity tests
Integrity tests help determine a candidate’s honesty, dependability, and work ethic. These tests help candidates to self-report their tendencies toward certain behaviors. Overt integrity test probes candidates directly for any dangerous or counterproductive behaviors. Covert integrity test uses personality-based tests to help identify if a candidate will maintain behavioral integrity in the workplace.
4. Skills tests
Skills tests help in measuring candidates’ broad and specific job-related competencies. It help to identify if the candidate possesses technical or professional expertise to perform their job role. It enables employers to understand candidates’ strengths and weaknesses and their job readiness.
Conclusion
Pre-employment tests add significant value to the job hiring process. It enables employers to make the right hiring decision by enabling evidence-based decision-making. With these tests, companies can improve the quality of their hire and streamline their talent acquisition efforts.
