Your first question when reading this may be: what exactly is pre-employment testing?
Pre-employment testing is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a series of tests and screening processes companies can use to vet candidates prior to the hiring process. Doing this can dramatically cut down on the time spent researching and interviewing clients who may not be a good fit for the position.
There are a number of things pre-employment testing can do. Pre-employment tests and assessments can be used to figure out what knowledge your potential hire already has, as well as identify any specific characteristics or skills you are looking for in a candidate.
Currently, there are four main types of pre-employment testing that can be done, and if all four are utilized, it may one day replace the resume.
- Personality-based assessments can help you figure out if your potential candidate has the personality traits you are looking for. These tests make it easy to see if your potential hire is responsible, organized, driven, or anything else specific your job requires.
- Skill-based assessments are similar to personality tests insofar as they make it easy for you to quickly and accurately assess your candidate. Using a variety of simulated job tasks, you can easily test potential hires to see if they would have the skills necessary to perform tasks for your job.
- Integrity-based assessments are used to help evaluate a candidate’s thought processes and reactions to certain situations, and are similar to personality tests. The main difference is that this can be used to assess a client’s attitudes towards problem-solving, work-related disputes, honesty, and alcohol and drug use.
- Cognitive-based assessments help employers figure out their candidate’s mental capacity as well as intelligence. These tend to be broader than the skill-based assessments. Instead of focusing on specific skills, it focuses more on critical thinking, problem-solving, and logical reasoning.
Overall, these pre-employment tests offer an insight into a more specific part of a candidate’s personality and mind than a resume would do. While resumes can be useful to look at things like job history or academic achievements, they don’t do much when it comes to real-life situations, or offer any kind of specific intel into what a candidate can actually do.
As opposed to simply seeing a stellar resume and hiring a candidate that may not actually be a good fit for your job, by using pre-employment testing you can more accurately ascertain if your potential hire is going to be the right fit for both your company and job. These assessments are built to test your hire’s entire scope of practice, not just their past skills and experience, giving you a better idea of who you are really hiring.
So before going through the monotonous recruitment and hiring process just to end up with a candidate who may not be ideal, give pre-employment testing a shot and see how it works for you.
