Benefits of Pre-employment Assessment Tests

Spend half the time on hiring, but get top quality hires! No, we aren’t joking. We are talking about pre-employment testing for screening potential hires. On an average, it takes 52 days and 4000 USD to fill an open position. Using hiring assessments could bring down the time for hiring and increase the efficiency of the recruitment process.

According to a survey by Career Builder, 48% of the job applicants say that the pre-employment screening experience affects how favourably they view a potential employer. Employers looking to attract top talent need to provide superior candidate experience during the screening process. Pre-employment selection tests are the most effective ways to deliver superior candidate experience and hire top talent within short time durations.

Drawbacks of Manual Hiring Processes

Most organizations stick to the conservative practice of organizing a simple test and requesting the candidate for a personal interview. Such conventional hiring methods fail to keep up with the dynamics of the modern job market and large-scale recruitment requirements of organizations. Some of the challenges faced by organisations sticking to manual hiring methods are:

Inability to scale up: Organizing mass recruitment drives like campus recruitment or entry-level recruitment, or trainee hiring requires a robust hiring process that can scale up to screening several candidate profiles within short durations. Manual hiring methods cannot scale up to such mass recruitment drives.

Time consuming: manual hiring methods are time consuming and tedious to conduct. Screening profiles, scheduling tests and interviews, evaluating test results, comparing potential candidate profiles before choosing the candidate – all these steps when done manually demands a lot of time and effort. The productive work hours of recruitment professionals is wasted on repetitive hiring steps.

Human bias: manual hiring methods are ridden with human bias. While evaluating the candidate, personal bias of the evaluator/interviewer tends to influence the hiring decision. This in turn affects the quality of hiring.

Inadequate evaluation: the screening evaluations in manual processes do not provide a complete picture of the candidate’s capabilities, skills, and behavioural tendencies. In addition to matching the technical skills required for the role, the candidate’s personality should also be a good match with the soft skills required for the job. Manual evaluations fail to provide an objective evaluation of these skills.

Unsatisfactory candidate experience: manual hiring is marred with delays and bottlenecks. From the candidate’s perspective a delayed hiring process reflects badly on the brand. Undue delays will result in the candidate losing interest and exiting the hiring process prematurely. In all likelihood, the candidate would share the unsatisfactory hiring experience within the employment circles, which is bad publicity for the brand.

Using pre-employment tests in hiring not only accelerates the hiring process, but also improves the candidate experience.

Growing Need for Pre-employment Testing

Today, the hiring trend is not just filling current open positions, but planning ahead for talent requirements in future. Filling vacant positions with candidates having technical skills required for the job alone is not enough. Candidates with good learning skills and reasoning abilities that would help them upgrade their skill and knowledge for future requirements are desired by employers.

In addition to testing skills required to perform the current role, the hiring team also needs to gauge how the candidate would perform when given higher and more complex roles of responsibility and handle crisis situations at work. If you still think you can pull off recruitment successfully with traditional hiring methods, think again!

Can traditional hiring methods fulfill these complex hiring recruitments? The answer is an obvious NO! Traditional hiring methods have several drawbacks as mentioned in the above sections. They are neither adequate nor accurate in meeting dynamic requirements of the candidate-driven job market. Organizations are actively exploring efficient and effective ways of screening future-ready candidates. Pre-employment assessment tests are the most sought-after hiring methods that accelerate and streamline the hiring process.

What are pre-employment hiring assessments?

Pre-employment assessment tests are a set of assessments designed to evaluate technical skills, soft-skills, and personality traits of prospective candidates. Talent is a wholesome combination of core traits and acquired skills. Assessing both these critical components is the basis of pre-employment screening assessments. Pre-employment testing is a standardized approach for gathering necessary information on job applicants and verifying whether the information matches their hands-on skills.

The hiring assessment software is designed to streamline the entire interview process, simplify it and make it easier for organizations to test every candidate in every front. Examples of the evaluations included in pre-employment assessment tests are hard skill tests, personality test, a leadership test, soft skills, and previous work sample evaluation.

While a majority of these tests can be automated on an online platform and evaluated instantly, some of them still need assistance from the human resources team. However, they will spend less time screening the candidates and forwarding them for an interview when empowered by a pre-employment assessment software.

For selection and assessment for various jobs, one needs to evaluate the core traits like behavioural tendencies, personality traits, and cognitive ability, and acquired skills like domain skills, coding skills, and communication skills.

Pre-employment screening assessments are scientifically built and validated by experts in various fields like software development, sales and marketing, production and manufacturing, and customer service. These assessments ensure holistic evaluation of various aspects of the candidate, such as their workplace behaviour, communication skills, attitude, aptitude required to fulfil a task, and their skills and knowledge. Pre-employment tests improve the match quality of hired workers.

With workforce analytics playing a key role in human resource management, pre-employment software offers a host of tools that companies can use to engage their employees better. Using pre-employment software in hiring improves the information flow of top talent and also bridges the gap between job requirements and available talent. Unlike conventional interviews that are intuition driven and subjective, hiring assessments provide a credible and standardized method for evaluating the prospect’s skills and abilities.

Skills evaluated by Pre-employment Selection tests

Pre-employment selection tests provide a wide array of screening tests that evaluate job skills, cognitive ability, and behavioural tendencies of candidates. A brief of various skill tests included in pre-employment assessments is given below.

Hard Skill Tests: Designed to test a person’s typing ability, coding skills, knowledge in programming language and managing capabilities. The skills tested are all directly related to the job role they are being hired for. It is one of the most basic and important tests that should be conducted with the help of SMEs to understand whether a candidate is an ideal fit.

Planned and Unplanned Interviews: A planned interview is a conventional way of testing a candidate’s skills with a set of predetermined questions that will be asked to all interviewees. This step follows the pre-employment test. An unplanned interview focuses more on a spontaneous reaction of a candidate and the interviewer should be able to keep changing questions. While the first round of an interview will be a planned one conducted by a junior member, it is wise to go for unplanned questions in later rounds. Most high-profile jobs and senior level positions will have managers opting for unplanned interviews to find what a candidate is truly capable of.

Personality Tests: A personality test is conducted by asking a series of hypothetical questions and attitude-based questions. It is used to determine how a candidate will respond to different scenarios and their ability to handle leadership situations if it arises. It can be conducted on paper and also in person if the interviewer can consequently ask questions based on the candidate’s responses.

Behavioural assessment: the behavioural competencies of candidates is evaluated through the behavioural assessment. Candidates are presented with a s number of job-related scenarios along with possible courses of action to choose from. The choices made by the candidates reveals behavioural tendencies of candidates. Behavioural experts will map the workplace behaviour with the competency framework defined for the role. Behavioral assessments can be customized for all job levels and use cases.

Cognitive ability test: this is an important evaluation that throws light on the critical thinking, verbal and logical reasoning, problem solving, and decision-making abilities of prospects. The current potential of candidates and how well they will perform on the job can be gauged by cognitive ability tests.

Choosing the Right Pre-employment Testing Software

The choice of pre-employment testing software makes all the difference to the success of the hiring process. The best pre-employment assessment test must have the following features:

Customizable test library: the skill library must be customizable as per the requirements of the job. For example: pre-employment English placement tests must consist of questions that test language proficiency, personality traits, and cognitive ability depending on the skill level required for the role. The question bank must be a good mix of questions with varying degrees of difficulty.

Easy to use platform: the pre-employment software must be designed on an easy-to-use platform. HR should spend more time working on the tool rather than learning how to use it. A user-friendly tool is easy to navigate and comprehend by HR at junior level and managerial level.

Online proctoring: the tool must easily adapt to online and offline hiring processes. Completely evolved pre-hiring assessment tools are equipped with anti-fraud measures like 3-step authentication, browsing tolerance, and secure browser.

Reports and analytics: the pre-employment software must provide instant reports and analytics on candidate performance to the hiring team. Based on this data, the hiring team can make informed hiring decisions.

SkillRobo is a pre-employment Assessment Software that comes with an impressive feature set that includes all of the above features and much more. This software provides highly effective tools for automating your testing process with questions prepared by subject matter experts. It has all the features an organization would need to test candidates on different levels and hire the right ones.

Advantages of Pre-employment Testing

It is evident from the discussions in all of the above sections that pre-employment testing software is “THE” go-to hiring tool for faster and effective hiring. There are several advantages of using these tools, some of which are mentioned below:

Reliability of hiring: the foremost advantage of using pre-employment testing is high reliability. These tests are scientifically designed and standardized for providing reliable and consistent recruitment results. The reliability of the assessment can be tested in several ways including: alternate or parallel validity, test-retest reliability, inter-rater reliability, and internal consistency reliability.

Speedy hiring: pre-employment assessments are highly effective when hiring at scale. Campus recruitment drives or off-campus drives can be quickly and effectively conducted using pre-employment skill assessments.

Remote hiring: administration of these tests can be easily done via email links. The candidate simply has to click on the link to take up the test. Once the test is completed, the software provides instant reports and analytics to the HR team. These tests enable effective remote hiring.

Secure browser: candidates are required to take up the test on a secure browser, which checks for fraud or cheating during the test. The online activity of candidates is recorded throughout the test so that the HR is aware of the activities of the candidates at all times.

Conclusion

The process of interviewing and hiring candidates has undergone a major evolution. A reliable testing platform can help conduct automated tests for at least 100 candidates or even more. They can be physically located in any part of the world and all you have to do is forward it to the database. The recruiting software will help you shortlist only those who got the required scores and forward them to the next level.

SkillRobo is an online pre-employment testing software that is trusted by leading organizations across the globe. Fully-customizable skill library, remote proctoring, instant reports and analytics are just some of the features provided by SkillRobo.

To explore SkillRobo, all you need to do is sign up for the free trial