Pre-employment assessments are a fantastic way to help businesses identify potential worker issues early on. By taking the time to ask questions about your prospective team member’s skills, strengths, weaknesses, and personality, you can get a clear picture of whether a job applicant would be a good fit for the role. An assessment can also provide you with valuable information about your current staff, which you can use to improve your working environment and the way you run your business.
Since there are many types of pre-employment evaluation tools on the market, you may want to focus on aptitude tests if you don’t have the budget to use several assessment methods. Aptitude assessment focuses on evaluating the cognitive ability of the applicants so you can find out if they can perform tasks properly in the workplace.
If you haven’t implemented pre-employment evaluation or you’re not using any testing tool yet, here are five reasons to start using pre-employment assessments as part of your hiring process:
- Streamlines Your Recruitment Process
Hiring new employees can be exhausting for your HR and managerial staff, primarily if a single job opening generates hundreds of applicants. Fortunately, you can streamline the hiring system with the help of assessment testing. Such tools will enable you to filter out applicants who pass the test and show determination to move forward with the interview and other steps in the process.
As a result, you drastically cut down the time and effort you spend responding to applicants and interviewing people who may not be ideal for the vacant position. Your HR department can focus on doing employment and background checks on just a few remaining candidates with strong cognitive abilities to perform the role if they get hired.
- Saves Time And Resources
The use of pre-employment tools would allow you to make a quicker decision to hire people at a time when the competition for good talent is high. The less time it takes for you to fill a vacant position, the more resources, money, and time your company can save and put to better use.
According to figures from LinkedIn’s new study, engineering and research industries have the slowest hiring times, reaching over 45 days. Meanwhile, on average, the time to hire among companies from non-technical fields is around 30 days based on data from June 2020 to March 2021. An effective pre-employment evaluation process can be instrumental in cutting down these estimates to a few days.
- Helps You Find The Ideal Fit
It’s often challenging to find talented and skilled candidates who are available for the job opening. When hiring people, it’s typical for businesses to discover that, after some time, the new hires aren’t the ideal fit for the job or the organization. If you don’t have a system to help you weed out candidates who can’t handle the role you’re hiring for, you’ll end up hiring someone who’s a bad fit. Consequently, you waste your time, money, and energy recruiting for the same position again.
However, with the help of pre-employment assessments, you’ll find out through test results if an applicant’s skill set matches the demands of the vacant position. Aside from determining mental capacity and problem-solving skills, some aptitude tests can also predict a candidate’s success on the job and even identify potential leadership skills.
- Makes For A Defensible Selection Process
Having a legally compliant employment selection process is crucial for your company. With the help of pre-employment tests, you’ll be able to screen candidates without bias.
Suppose a candidate complains of discrimination based on gender or ethnicity. In that case, you can readily provide your reasons for declining their application based on their aptitude assessment screening results.
Pre-employment tests are regulated by federal guidelines, which are in place to ensure non-discriminatory practices are upheld.
- May Help Improve Employee Retention
A poor job fit is one of the reasons why a good team member leaves a company. It occurs when individuals work in a position that neither matches their natural strengths nor fits their personal and professional needs. Employees who work in roles that don’t feel right for them tend to be less happy, less motivated, and less likely to stick around. Meanwhile, employees who think they’re in a job that’s cut out for them tend to be effective, productive, and happy team members who stay for long.
So, a reliable way to ensure a lower turnover rate is finding the right person for the job right from the get-go. Besides, low attrition rates typically boost corporate morale, improve your company’s reputation, and enable you to attract the best candidates. Moreover, your organization can save on costs related to recruitment, training, and severance pay.
The Bottom Line
Today’s competitive marketplace requires that you staff your organization as effectively as possible. Through the help of pre-employment tests, you can do just that—save on time and resources during the selection process. Ultimately, using such tools, you’ll most likely find the right candidate with the skills to perform well or even exceed expectations in their roles.
