What are the benefits of pre-employment assessment tools?
The use of a pre-employment assessment tool is a must if you want to speed up the hiring process. Most employers are using talent assessment tools to make their recruitment process faster and streamlined. Throughout the hiring process, employers aim to gather as much relevant information from their candidates. Unfortunately, they often face the problem of traditional techniques; telephonic and resume-based screenings of candidates who don’t yield impressive results make the process lengthy and expensive.
Employers of pre-employment evaluation tools appreciate success and beneficial effects on their operations. Pre-employment testing tools help in reducing the time spent on reading resumes, conducting interviews, and costs associated with hiring. Tests will increase the quality of hires and simultaneously reduce less qualified candidates. Ultimately, this leads to an improvement in turnover and workforce productivity.
Type of Pre-Employment Testing Methods
Consider the various types of methods and tools available for pre-employment testing:
1. One-way video interviewing
One way video interview platforms allow recruiters to send preset questions to candidates and candidates can record a short video answer. These recorded answers aid candidates in elaborating on their resumes, and recruiters gain insight into how candidates carry themselves and communicate concepts. One-way video interviewing also helps recruiters determine who to shortlist for the next round.
Also read:- What is a one-way video interview?
2. Skill testing tools
These tools assess the hard or technical skills of candidates. Skill tests are available for software development skills, language skills, sales-driving, customer, and computer support.
3. Aptitude Test
These tests are done to measure candidates’ natural ability in areas like numerical, verbal, and nonverbal aptitude.
4. Personality testing
This is where recruiters use techniques designed to measure the personality of a person in various situations. Multiple companies have created different types of personality tests depending on the job.
5. Cognitive behavior testing
Recruiters measure cognitive ability and work behaviors to indicate the potential of a candidate.
6. Typing test
Just as it sounds, recruiters use typing tests to gauge their candidates’ typing speed and accuracy.
7. Coding test
Often used in more technical jobs (though not limited!), these tests allow recruiters to measure the candidate’s coding knowledge, logical skills, and technical knowledge.
Benefits of Pre-Employment Testing
Pre-employment tests offer a wide range of benefits that not only help in streamlining the hiring process but also strengthen the organization so that new employees will be successful in their positions. Pre-employment testing helps in increasing the company’s turnover, higher customer satisfaction, and increased sales. Thus, choosing pre-employment assessment tools shouldn’t be taken lightly. So, let’s have a look at the benefits that a good tool should offer.
1. Give more power to recruiters
Every job requires various skills, and evaluating candidates according to their skills is a tough and tedious task for both recruiters and hiring managers. If one needs to assess one or a few hundred candidates, pre-employment assessment tools provide ready-to-use skill tests which help the recruiters decide whether the candidates have basic or advanced skills required as per the job role.
2. Reduce the screening time
It is cost-effective because available positions are left unfilled for an excessively long time—not because there aren’t enough applicants, but rather because, on average, 250 resumes are sent online for each vacancy. Helps in decreasing the time for closing the new hire, ensuring their smooth onboarding. The resume screening platform helps in choosing the best candidates based on the parameters set by the recruiters for the jobs. The efficiency that the pre-employment tool provides to the hiring managers is about decreasing time spent on the interview and the time to hire.
3. Easily remove the noise
Spammers are excluded, whether or not they are appropriate for the role. It helps in removing unnecessary data easily by just applying filters where appropriate.
4. Better Hiring Decisions
Tests are the easiest means of predicting the performance as to which extent the candidates have the knowledge and skills needed in a job to perform. Traditional methods of interviewing and resume processing have become outdated, resulting in poor-quality decision-making. This, unfortunately, means recruiters tend to hire the ones who give good interviews, rather than someone with the real talent required for the role.
5. Allows more candidates to participate in the process
In the pre-employment testing tool, all the filters are removed, thus all the candidates get the chance to show off their skills. This leads to fewer hires after the probation ends and the managers can spend less time managing poor-performing employees.
6. Enhances candidate experience
Delivering a positive candidate experience is essential for the whole organization as even the best candidate will decline the offer if they have a bad experience. A candidate’s experience is not always an important factor in the recruitment strategy, so the interview is a two-way process and the candidate gets the chance to decide whether their expectation matches the actual experience they get during the interview process. Thus a positive candidate experience encourages them to spread the word to their friends, which results in more referrals.
7. Easier to share data with hiring managers
The hiring managers can ask for the candidate’s data from the recruiters which helps them in better and faster decision-making. The performance of the candidate can easily be measured with the pre-employment tools data.
8. More efficient
The recruiting process is a time-consuming process and we all know that when the time to hire increases it affects an organization in many ways leading to criticism, loss of revenue, and productivity because vacant positions are open for longer than they should. Candidates that are in great demand frequently lose interest in the lengthy interview processes and pick other, simpler offers. Pre-employment testing is essential in cutting the hiring process time in half. The assessments make you spend less time on tedious tasks and decrease the overall time to complete the hiring process. Setting minimum cutoff scores in tests can filter out the number of applicants for the video or in-person interview. Research by Accounts and Legal UK found that the time spent by a recruiter in screening candidates plus the interviews can be best used as a working week in hours.
9. Reporting and Candidate Insights
One of the perks of the online assessment tools is that the candidate skills report is generated instantly upon completion. It gives you a quick and in-depth analysis of their test performance. With the help of these reports, they can make faster decisions in their hiring process.
10. Unbiased hiring process
Online assessment tools not only validate the hiring process by screening the right candidates but also remove the unconscious bias caused by human factors. They assess each and every candidate with the same importance and generate a report which removes any unfair judgment or bias by humans.
Conclusion
In order to choose a pre-employment testing tool, you should first identify the hiring goals and job requirements. It is important to understand the skill tests you need to access for the role. If you want to stand out and hire the best candidates you need to have the best-suited recruitment tools for your process. You should access various tools and try them with some of your jobs to drill down the best recruitment product for you.
