Did you know that every corporate opening receives close to 250 resumes according to Glassdoor?
Surprised?
With so many job applications at your disposal. You would probably be scanning and going through the resumes for more than a week while your vacant position remains open. When a position remains unfilled for a long-time, your cost of vacancy can increase manifold.
That’s why organizations and HR managers worldwide rely on the power of pre-employment skills assessment.
Regardless of whether you’re a start-up or an established firm, pre-employment assessments can cut down the time. It takes to fill your vacant position while ensuring quality hire. Using pre-employment skill testing or assessment, you can weed out unfit candidates for your open position.
Before exploring why pre-employment testing can help you hire quality candidates, let’s understand what it means.
What is Pre-employment Testing?
Pre-employment testing is an assessment that a candidate undergoes during the hiring process.
These assessments can test a candidate on various skills and help an organization understand their personality traits. One bad hire can cost you a whopping $15,000. For this reason, using pre-employment assessments offered by companies like TestGorilla. ESkill or mocha is a great way to streamline your talent acquisition process and reduce the overall cost of vacancy.
Let’s explore why businesses who leverage the power of these assessment tasks never face any bad hire issues like their competitors!
7 Reasons Why Pre-Employment Skills Testing is the Key to Hiring the Best
Here are seven reasons why a company looking to fill a position should invest in pre-employment skills testing.
1. Speeds up your time to hire
You don’t have to make candidates go through rigorous rounds of interviews and aptitude, juggle calendars of team members, and free up schedules of interviewers. Instead, you can focus on using pre-employment testing to hire the best talent for your vacant position.
Candidates can complete these assessment tests while sitting in their homes.
Before setting a test for a candidate, you can set a minimum score a candidate must achieve to move on to the next interview round. Instead of spending hours and days screening every resume and brainstorming over a suitable candidate with other HR professionals, this test can do half of your job.
These tests automatically reject those who score below the minimum marks.
Interestingly, it can help you weed out many ‘resume spammers’ who apply for a job with minimal thought and preparation. Why?
Such candidates would be hesitant to sit for an online exam. On the other hand, applicants who give an online test are usually least serious enough about your job opening.
Interesting fact: Given that the average time to fill a vacant position is 42 days. Administering these pre-assessments at the top of your hiring funnel can help you find the best-fit candidates.
2. Enhances legal defensibility
Contrary to popular belief, pre-employment testing is a great way to increase your legal defensibility in your talent acquisition process.
When these skills tests are job-related, the federal guidelines govern these tests and ensure non-discriminatory and equitable hiring practices.
Interestingly, these tests provide an extra layer of security because all these pre-employment tests are scientifically validated predictors for an employee’s success in a job role. This allows small businesses and MNCs to defend their hiring process if a candidate questions the legality of their talent acquisition process.
It helps you implement the hiring process as per different federal and state guidelines.
Interesting statistics: In 2018, Season 52 chain paid $2.85 million to settle a class-action lawsuit claiming that the company engaged in age discrimination in its hiring practice. For companies who want to prevent such lawsuits, investment in a pre-employment test makes complete sense.
3. Increases employee retention
Pre-employment assessments can increase employee retention because your new employees are likely to have the basic aptitude required to fulfill job-specific duties. Moreover, these employees have the required personality and temperament to complete a given job.
With pre-employment skills testing, you can screen candidates efficiently for both aptitude and personality. This can help you understand whether a candidate is likely to stay long-term with your company or leave it at the first opportunity they get.
When an employee is a near-perfect match for a job role. The chances of performing poorly and not completing their required training don’t arise. It also reduces the likelihood that employees will quit on their own.
Reducing turnover rates and enhancing employee retention can create ripples throughout your organization. This is because low turnover rates would boost employee morale and make you an employee-friendly company.
Enhancing employee retention leads to concrete benefits to your bottom line.
Some of the expenses associated with replacing candidates include selection, training, recruitment cost, and severance pay you may have to give to departing employees.
Interesting statistics: The cost of replacing entry-level employees is 16% of their annual salary, and this cost increases for higher-paid positions.
4. Eliminates common hiring error
According to research, a major part of any talent acquisition process is unfair and biased.
Unconscious racism, sexism, and age discrimination can take a toll and make your hiring process biased.
Most HR managers find it daunting to minimize biases, especially when their biases have led to good hires in the past – after all, completely eliminating judgment during the hiring process could result in a bad hire.
If you’re looking to eliminate some common hiring errors from your recruitment process. It’s time you get some help from pre-employment testing.
Pre-employment testing narrows down your potential candidates based on factors that matter the most to your organization. It shortlists candidates based on relevant factors like personality traits and skills rather than demographic, age, or other irrelevant factors.
Interesting statistics: To avoid common hiring bias, 82% of companies use some pre-employment assessment tests.
5. Provides data-driven and scientific selection criteria
Intuitions and gut feelings no longer work in the hiring process. This is because a candidate who may seem a good fit at first glance may not prove beneficial for your organization.
That’s why organizations turn to data analysis and pre-employment assessments to make the all-important hiring decisions.
Based on the result of these tests, employers can hire candidates who can meet the industry benchmark.
With the test results, you can get information about job candidates in a shorter timeframe than it takes to sift through hundreds of resumes manually.
Interesting statistics: According to research, hiring managers who use pre-employment assessments are 36% more satisfied with their hiring decision than those who don’t use any assessment test.
6. Helps create a development plan for new employees and their growth
In uncertain and unprecedented times like today, companies require various tools and software to develop their people and reskill a section of their workforce.
To reskill a particular section of employees, you need details of the specific skills that require training.
Using pre-employment skills testing can help employers understand where a candidate needs training.
These assessments provide a particular focused area of improvement for your new hires and enable your HR department to work on your employee’s development journey.
When you understand what your employees need, you can provide them with the necessary skills and plan their career growth.
Interesting statistics: According to a study, 87% of employers believe that candidates misrepresent themselves on their resume and job application.
7. Helps you compare candidates
As pre-employment tests are online assessments, each candidate is given a score. Using this score, it becomes easy to compare candidates with the same qualification and experience.
When you’re confused between two similar candidates, pre-employment tests can help you choose the best candidate from an entire lot. Let’s say you’re faced with a whole heap of resumes for a lead tax analyst position. By putting candidates through their paces, you can prove that they have the experience they claim on their application.
What’s more, these assessment tests and surveys can give you an unbiased data-driven opinion. They can also help you simplify your applicant pool and create a shortlist of candidates with whom you can move ahead in the next step of your talent acquisition process.
Companies that use these skills tests can help you weed out unsuitable candidates before you introduce potential hires to your company’s ecosystem.
Interesting statistics: According to research, organizations that use pre-employment assessment tests are 24% more likely to hire employees who exceed their performance goals.
Wrapping up
Pre-employment assessments tests are a helpful way to sift through candidates and an excellent way to weed out candidates who don’t fit your organization or job role.
With these tests, you can give every candidate a fair and adequate assessment and create a top-of-the-shelf experience for your candidates.
For those who don’t have all the time in the world, these employment tests are a blessing in disguise. After all, they can help you save money, improve the accuracy of your hiring process and hire the right set of people.
However, don’t completely rely on pre-employment testing as it may not give you a complete picture of a potential employee. When you use these tests in tandem with other recruitment methods, you can find competent candidates.
Making these tests a part of your recruitment process will reduce the time you would ordinarily waste sifting through resumes. With these tests, you can hire candidates who can take your organization ahead.