Several aspects are required to achieve success and efficiency in a company. One of these is forming and creating a skilled workforce. Regardless of how big your business or firm is, you will need experienced staff to thrive in the market.
Indeed, it is critical to employ only the best and suitable hires. Yet, most companies are not proficient in job postings, interviewing, and screening the best prospect for the position. This is where the importance of pre employment skills testing comes in.
But, what exactly is it and why is it so important? Find out here
Defining Pre-Employment Skills Testing
Skills testing is a crucial part of the recruitment and hiring process, wherein employers test the skills of their applicants. It is an effective means to ensure that the candidates possess the vital skills for the job role that needs to be filled. It would gauge the applicant’s skill to successfully and excellently do the tasks and responsibilities associated with the position.
Industries often employ skills testing to narrow down the pool of candidates who applied for the vacancy. After doing so, they will invite the remaining applicants for a job interview.
Pre-employment assessments offer a wide range of benefits that modernize the hiring procedure and strengthen the whole organization by increasing the probability that new workers will be successful in their roles. These can also help guarantee a match between the employee selection course and the anticipated business results, namely a higher customer satisfaction rate, increased sales, and lower turnover in the long run.
5 Reasons Why Pre-Employment Assessment Is Beneficial
Now that you have a good idea of what pre-employment skills testing is all about, here five reasons why it is beneficial for businesses:
- Increases Employee Retention
Employee retention and minimizing turnover are highly crucial to a company.
With the help of pre-employment assessment, employers can now efficiently screen applicants for personality and character. Hence, they can judge if a candidate is more likely to stay in the role or not. It can also help determine whether the applicant will fit in with the organization’s culture in the long run.
Remember that personnel who are not the correct fit for the job will ultimately underperform in their role engagement and productivity. Thus, such an individual is more likely to leave the company.
- Gives Exceptional Experience to Job Seekers
With the help of pre-employment skills testing, bias is removed during the applicant assessment procedure. Rather than relying on resumes, credentials, interviews, and intuition, employers can now measure the skill level of applicants through pre-employment exams. It will make the entire candidate evaluation course a lot simpler and quicker.
Most job seekers nowadays feel that traditional hiring is very biased. They believe that they frequently do not get a fair chance of getting considered for the job. Indeed, there can be biases embedded within the hiring process without employers realizing such.
Thankfully, pre-employment skills testing can help boost the candidate’s experience. Applicants can now have the fulfillment of knowing that they will receive an impartial opportunity to land the job — knowing that they will be evaluated on their skills.
Additionally, some platforms will enable you to generate reports for unsuccessful candidates. It would be greatly appreciated, as candidates can assess their limits and review their skills to know how to improve and get hired in the future.
- Lowers Recruitment Cost
Employers know how vital it is to keep costs as low as possible. A wrong hire can cost a company lots of money while waiting for the best person needed. Thus, work quality and productivity might be stopped while waiting for someone qualified to do the job.
Fortunately, a pre-employment skills test is an effective way to keep costs as low as possible.
- Hires Better Applicants
Another benefit of utilizing employment skills testing is hiring much better candidates. With pre-employment skills testing, recruiters can evaluate the skill sets of all candidates. Undeniably, multi-measure tests are the best approach to predicting on-the-job achievement compared to job experience analysis through reference checks.
Bear in mind that the success of businesses depends on their employees’ skill sets. Thus, make sure you have the best team behind you.
- Reduces Time to Find the Perfect Hire
The entire recruiting process can be very time-consuming as it naturally takes around nine weeks to fill in a new position, as published by Indeed.com. Additionally, fast-growing applicant pools make it more difficult for recruiters to manage the applicant flow and recognize suitable candidates.
One of the most significant benefits of pre-employment skills testing is finding the right hire for your business a lot easier and quicker. Using such evaluation before employment allows you to screen unqualified candidates before checking their resumes. Thus, you spend less time on candidates who are not fit for the job and significantly reduce hiring time.
Moreover, setting minimum cutoff scores for tests can speedily reduce the number of applicants qualified for in-person or phone interviews. Lessening the time spent on the interview process severely reduces the overall recruitment process.
You can narrow down candidates and streamline the hiring procedure without wasting time and resources with excellent pre-employment evaluation software. Your hiring team will have greater ease and focus in ranking applicants with just a few mouse clicks along the way.
Determine The Most Appropriate Testing Needed Thru KSAOs
If you want to know what pre-employment testing procedure to use, you must identify the KSAOs required to perform the job.
So, what are KSAOs? It is the knowledge, skills, abilities and other characteristics (KSAOs) needed to perform the job excellently and with quality.
- Knowledge
It is information the worker must possess, such as accounting principles or how medical procedures are done.
It is evaluated through oral and written examinations. The employer can also formulate and validate their questions for an interview or written exam as long as they see that they ask identical questions for every applicant of the same job post.
- Skills
These are learned behaviors required to perform a specific job successfully. These may include typing, computing for specific formulas, drawing, and the like.
Skills are best evaluated by letting the applicant perform them. Some skills are more easily assessed, but some can be quite challenging to measure. Henceforth, companies ought to develop a validated, job-related, and standardized assessment procedure to be used by each applicant.
- Abilities
Abilities are those observable behaviors, including the ones looked-for to perform the physical requirements of the job. Such may be lifting weights, climbing the stairs, driving a vehicle, and the like.
These are best assessed through actual demonstration. Bear in mind, though, that when active physical activity is involved, safety concerns may affect evaluation.
Consequently, several employers favor the mental ability tests that measure general intelligence, but it is indeterminate if such tests can predict job performance. They even have a discriminatory effect on specific groups of individuals.
Different Types of Pre-Employment Testing
Here are some of the pre-employment tests employers give their applicants:
- Physical Ability Tests
Physical ability tests measure stamina and strength. They reveal if one can perform roles requiring physical work, such as a police officer or firefighter. Testing for physical skills adds another step to the hiring procedure to reduce the chances of workplace accidents aside from finding the most qualified candidate/s.
- Skills Assessment Tests
Skills assessment tests highlight your hard and soft skills. Employers often use this when applicants are in the later hiring process.
For instance, if a firm wants to hire a public relations coordinator, they would like to give a writing test to check how many words one can type per minute, write quality content within a timeline, and proofread your content before submitting it.
- Emotional Intelligence Tests
Emotional intelligence examinations examine your ability to build relationships and your knowledge of your emotions. A high emotional intelligence displays you can resolve conflicts and relieve the anxiety of coworkers if they are frustrated. Some of the skills revealed during the emotional intelligence test include empathy, adaptability, and teamwork.
- Personality Tests
Personality tests direct employers to fit within the company’s culture, and personality leads to increased productivity. Test results usually help employers assess the applicant’s engagement level and long-term commitment.
- Cognitive Ability Tests
Cognitive ability tests ask inquiries about the candidate’s mental capacity to work in a specific position. The answers help employers predict job performance since they know how the applicant handles complexity.
- Integrity tests
Integrity tests are among the most objective tests and help measure the trustworthiness of applicants. Integrity may prove that a job hunter matches the employer’s culture and shows one can work well with coworkers.
Below are the example questions that might be asked in an integrity test:
- Would you do it if a customer asks you to do an illegal activity?
- Have you lied to your supervisor before?
- Is it proper to publish work samples on your website?
- How would you act if a coworker or manager lets you do something that violates the company policy?
- Do you have the same core values outside and inside of the workplace?
- Job Knowledge Tests
Employers give job knowledge tests to detect the applicant’s knowledge about the job they are applying for. If the employer hires a managerial accountant, the candidate might receive a knowledge test about internal accounting processes.
Getting tested on the specific job elements assists in determining if one can apply the expertise they have from their previous accounting experiences.
Types of Validity Measures
Many different types of validity measures are used to validate the pre-employment tests. The most important ones are criterion validity, content validity, and construct validity.
- Criterion Validity
The most effective way a company can demonstrate the validity of its testing program is to prove its criterion validity. Criterion validity or concrete validity is the relationship between two variables, namely between the desired business metric and test scores.
The business metric often measures employee performance or organization-wide business outcomes like employee retention. The connection between job performance and test performance can be quantified by a correlation coefficient that ranges from -1.0 to +1.0, which measures the extent to which test scores foretell forthcoming work performance. Criterion validity is difficult to measure compared with other types since it requires extensive sample sizes for every job position.
Two types of criterion validity are predictive validity and concurrent validity. Predictive validity is determined by noticing how likely the applicants’ test scores predict future job performance. In contrast, concurrent validity is determined by comparing test scores of the current employees to measure their job performance.
- Content Validity
Content validity calculates how well the subject matter relates to the skills required by a particular job. Establishing a test’s content validity concerns demonstrating that test items reflect the knowledge or skills needed for a specific position. Guaranteeing that a pre-employment test has content validity is necessary for establishing that the test follows job-relatedness.
- Construct Validity
A pre-employment test has this if it gauges what is supposed to be measured. It refers to how much a test correlates with a theoretical scientific construct like extraversion, general intelligence, etc.
Final Thoughts
Pre-employment skills testing is crucial in the entire recruitment and hiring process. It helps reduce hiring costs, the average time spent by companies to hire qualified staff, and business turnover. These exams also diminish bias and prejudice in personnel selection.
Moreover, it helps ensure that the recruitment reflects the company’s brand and that candidates will get a satisfactory and fair experience. Employers can now add objectivity and equality in their recruiting process through top-quality pre-employment tests.
Furthermore, it is still best to use pre-employment tests in combination with other assessment methods that researchers have checked for reliability and validity to increase the credibility of the recruitment course. Such may add up to the time spent in hiring, but it can result in better employment decisions in the long run.
Truthfully, suppose one can master the art of recruitment. In that case, one can give their company the most excellent chance of success and efficiency.
