Pre-employment assessments are a way to increase productivity, boost performance, and decrease turnover. But if you are not seeing these results, you might be wrong in your approach.
Here are 5 signs that you need to reconsider your pre-employment assessment approach.
Your hires are not getting better
When you invest in an expensive and lengthy assessment, you want it to pay off. There is a goal for every assessment – to predict overall job success or the likelihood of turnover, or which candidates are most likely to commit theft. You need to rethink your assessment if it is not hitting your KPIs (key performance indicators). But remember, that the fault might be in the delivery mechanism, not the assessment itself.
The dropout rates for your assessment are high
An average online assessment has more than 100 questions, but it can predict performance only if the candidates complete it. And completion rates can plummet by 50% when the test contains more than 50 questions. If you do not see improvement in the performance metrics, you should check the dropout, where it occurs in the recruiting funnel, and whether the assessment is too long.
Your candidates are probably applying for other positions as well and prioritizing interviews. So top candidates might find a long assessment too much of work – while less desirable candidates will make sure to complete it. It might be unrealistic to expect the best candidates to prioritize a lengthy assessment – make sure that the time they need to invest is not the reason that will cause them to drop out of the process.
Your assessment strategy has not been updated recently
With new tools and technology emerging and changing on a daily basis, jobs evolve rapidly. You need to make sure that the competencies you are focusing on are not obsolete. The critical KPIs for a lot of jobs change and evolve, but your assessment needs to be able to go without updates for longer periods as it takes a good amount of time and effort to build a valid predictive assessment. Your assessment strategy needs to be future-proof and be able to go without changes for longer periods but still be able to provide you with hiring decisions based on relevant data.
You are investing a lot of time and effort in branding and candidate experience
A great candidate experience includes key components such as convenient screening methods to prioritize the time of the candidate, custom-branded videos to introduce the candidate to your organization, and short applications to return feedback.
If you need to invest a lot of time and effort to provide a great candidate experience, this means that your assessment strategy is inefficient and needs to be reconsidered.
Your assessment is not mobile-optimized
Almost the whole hiring process has gone mobile – and your assessment needs to as well. But assessment tests often lag behind other steps of the recruiting process since they are generally perceived as the realm of psychologists, not of talent acquisition professionals. In case your candidates can fill out the application online but need to move to a computer to complete the assessment, this is definitely not the best possible candidate experience you can provide.
