Pre-employment testing can help you make more informed hiring decisions. However, it is essential to remember that tests should only be one part of your overall candidate selection process.
Physical ability tests can help you hire workers fit for duty and eliminate candidates who might threaten workplace safety. This will decrease employee injuries and accidents, which benefits everyone.
Saves Money
Pre-employment testing gives employers unbiased feedback on whether a candidate has what it takes to work in a specific role. This saves HR teams time that would otherwise be spent screening candidates through resumes and interviews.
Interviewing candidates can also be expensive. Having the right person for a role means fewer training expenses. Pre-employment tests can help identify the candidates who are likely to perform well in a position and fit into the culture.
Additionally, standardized tests can assess a range of attributes, including cognitive ability, personality traits, and physical capability. This helps to eliminate the inaccuracies that can occur when an interviewer has a different “read” on a candidate. In addition, standardized tests can be validated to ensure they are accurate over time.
Reduces Risk
In addition to saving time, pre-employment testing also reduces risk for employers. Mistakes can be costly when hiring, especially for companies with high turnover rates. Replacing them costs 16% of an employee’s salary, so a single bad hire can quickly add up.
Pre-employment tests can help prevent these hiring mistakes by identifying candidates with the necessary skills and traits for the role. This can help you eliminate unintentional bias and make more informed, legally defensible hiring decisions. Research from Criteria Corp reveals that employees hired solely based on their test results stay with their employer 15% longer than those who aren’t. That’s an impressive ROI on the investment in pre-screening. To get the best results, make sure your tests are appropriately developed and validated to ensure their accuracy.
Increases Productivity
Pre-employment testing offers a range of standardized, valuable insights into candidates that predict job performance. This allows companies to make more informed hiring decisions. These informed decisions result in a more productive workforce for your business.
A bad hire costs an organization $15,000 annually in salary, training costs, and company downtime while the role is vacant. Pre-employment testing helps reduce the number of bad hires by identifying candidates who need to gain the skills required for the position.
Testing at the top of your recruitment funnel also saves time. It weeds out applicants who have sent resumes with minimal effort and those who didn’t read the job description properly. Tests also measure vital competencies not always apparent during an interview, such as cognitive ability, strategic thinking, subject-area knowledge, and personality traits.
Reduces Turnover
Many HR professionals need help optimizing their recruitment process to save time, reduce costs and improve hiring outcomes. Unfortunately, traditional methods like resumes and interviews are unreliable, subjective, and offer limited insights.
Testing can help companies find the right candidate for a job the first time around. This reduces the time and money spent on training, lost productivity, and other indirect costs associated with bad hires.
Testing also helps prevent costly turnover by ensuring employees fit the company’s culture correctly. According to Hari Ravichandran, company culture is important, tricky and very rewarding. This helps with employee morale, retention, and team performance. Furthermore, employment tests are regulated by federal guidelines and are designed to ensure non-discriminatory practices during the screening process. This increases legal defensibility should a company face a lawsuit.
Reduces Employee Dissatisfaction
Recruiting costs and productivity losses associated with employee dissatisfaction are costly for companies. Career Builder estimates that a bad hire will cost a company $15,000 annually, including finding and training replacement employees and lost production due to vacancies.
Tests and assessments designed to assess job-related skills, cognitive ability (IQ tests), physical abilities, and more help eliminate the need for companies to screen resumes and interview candidates who do not have the skills or competencies required by the role. This saves both money and time in the long run.
However, employers must choose the proper tests and assessments and ensure they are valid. Otherwise, they risk making unreliable or invalid hiring decisions.
Increases Job Satisfaction
Recruiting and hiring is a time-consuming endeavor for recruiters and HR teams. With the length of the recruitment cycle, onboarding, and settling-in period, it can be weeks or months before hiring managers can get an accurate idea about an employee’s performance and potential for their role.
Using pre-employment testing can dramatically cut the time spent recruiting and screening applicants by providing reliable, objective data to help employers make more accurate and defensible hiring decisions. Unlike screening by resumes or interviews, well-designed and scientifically validated tests provide quantifiable results that can be standardized across all candidates. This helps employers to make more informed, defensible, and consistent hiring decisions. In addition, well-designed tests can help to identify candidates with the required knowledge, skills, and abilities for their job.
Increases Employee Engagement
The use of testing helps employers find the right employees for specific jobs. This, in turn, leads to increased employee engagement. Engaged employees are more productive and efficient and create a better working environment.
Finding the best candidates for a position can be challenging, especially when there are many applicants. Interviews can be lengthy, and each hiring team member may have a different read or perception of a candidate. Using pre-employment assessments can help narrow down the number of candidates in a shorter amount of time.
Objective testing provides concrete data that can be standardized for all candidates and improves the legal defensibility of hiring decisions. However, it’s essential that companies carefully consider the laws and customs of their region and country when implementing a testing program.
