As businesses cope with gigantic shifts in regulations, consumer expectations, and technology – the ability to attract high-quality workers becomes more important than ever. Over three-quarters of business leaders view skill gaps in the workforce as the major threat to their abilities to capitalize on market opportunities. Numerous companies from various fields are addressing this serious skill crunch by altering their recruitment strategies.
Pre-employment tests have proven to be the ultimate new-age recruitment tool for creating distinct competitive advantages for businesses. These assessment tests help recruiters identify candidates with the right personality, skills, and aptitude required to succeed in certain positions. Organizations are using pre-employment assessments to:
- Measure the problem-solving, critical thinking, and quantitative analysis skills of candidates via cognitive aptitude testing. For example, several multinational banking firms use numerical/logical reasoning tests to discover the best candidates from large pools of applicants.
- Assess the sales acumen of applicants by giving them sales aptitude examinations that test skills like – customer comprehension, on-the-spot decision-making, ability to improvise, and public relations capabilities.
- Pick the best candidates for customer-facing roles. Contrary to belief, gauging customer service aptitude is very much possible via pre-employment tests. The best customer service aptitude tests are designed to reveal the candidates’ key behavioral traits such as – diligence, self-management skills, service orientation, composure, and respect for the employers and their customers.
Businesses that integrate these pre-employment tests into their recruitment strategies are able to attract the right candidates with the right skills. Employee retention rates of these businesses are also significantly higher as they’re able to pick exactly the types of candidates they want. Candidates hired via online pre-employment tests are also far likelier to effectively deal with technology-driven disruptions in the future.
The use of pre-employment tests in hiring customer service professionals
Can pre-employment tests help businesses pick out the best customer service professionals from large talent pools? Yes. Testing customer service professionals is, of course, vastly different from testing an engineer with a Math and Physics-based test or an aspiring accountant with a logic and reasoning test. The key skills that pre-employment tests for customer service professionals help recruiters explore are:
- The applicants’ language skills.
- Their active listening skills.
- Oral comprehension and expression skills.
- Their tech literacy levels (how they interact with computers and other tech devices/tools required to effectively perform the customer service role in question).
Some of the world’s leading hiring managers working in the customer service industry are using resources from the best customer service assessment test platforms to make informed decisions about their customer service applicants. These employers screen candidates who’ve applied for customer service positions using tests such as:
- Standard job-based tests: Top pre-employment test platforms have a plethora of tests that companies use to recruit applicants for standard industry job positions like – customer service representative, call center manager, IT systems support analyst, etc. Companies can use these concise, up-to-date, and well-defined tests as the first line of defense against unqualified applicants.
- Skills-based tests: Want to hire customer service professionals who are good at data entry or Microsoft Excel? Customize the tests by using a pre-employment test platform’s existing catalog of subject and skills-based tests. These multi-subject tests can be customized to test the specific skills that companies want their recruits to have (e.g., computer proficiency, attention to detail, multitasking, etc.).
- Company-specific tests: Hiring companies can also partner with pre-employment test platforms to upload their own assessment-related content and create company-specific or job-specific tests of any length.
Why top companies are using pre-employment tests to hire customer service professionals
As population grows and demand for jobs keeps rising, employee turnover has become a problem that’s too hard to manage for several companies. Companies can’t afford to hire/fire large numbers of customer service professionals every year. They want to pick the right candidates with the right skills and invest time and money into these professionals to improve them in the long run. Using a combination of pre-employment assessment tests is the best solution to these problems.
These tests are easy and cheap to create. They can be heavily customized to give companies clear understandings of the applicants and their abilities. The results of these tests are always objective, and there’s little room for bias. They enable businesses to maximize their customer service provisions. Finding the best customer service agents has never been easier. Given that customer service is the beating heart of every company, having a workforce equipped to assist customers when they face problems in the best way possible is vital for companies.
Plus, refining the quality of a company’s customer service department directly impacts its revenue-generating capabilities. Around 86% of customers stop engaging/working with companies solely because of bad customer service. Amidst these increasing consumer demands, companies need to assess their customer service applicants in the most objective ways possible. Pre-employment tests for customer service professionals are currently the most potent tool that hiring managers possess.
