What is Mental Flexibility?

R U ADAPTABLE ENOUGH?
Are you asking job candidates to complete and pass office skill tests?  If not, you might be shortchanging those candidates – and your company.
A business doesn’t make its name on its superior level of office skills, but those office skills are the oil that keeps the business performing successfully. Here are the top three reasons why office skill tests can impact your company’s overall performance.

1. Less Training Time

New employees always need to be trained on office protocols, procedures, and workflows, but that training shouldn’t include how to complete those workflows.
When you hire people who are already proficient in certain office skills such as typing, using Microsoft Office, or data entry, you can give them jobs and know they’ll complete them quickly and efficiently.  When you don’t, jobs take longer because the employee needs to learn those skills and someone else needs to train him how to do it.  That’s time that could be spent working with customers, developing new business, or performing other core functions.

2. Higher Productivity

In the time it takes an unskilled employee to perform one task, a skilled employee could perform several, meaning the whole office is working faster.

Whether the employee is in an entry-level position or upper management, when one person can’t perform certain office skills, the whole office slows down.  Office skill tests weed out the people who can easily transition into their jobs from those who need extra time.  If two candidates are equal in all other ways, the skilled candidate is the more attractive one because he’ll ultimately be the more productive one.

3. Greater Employee Retention

When an employee takes too long to learn his or her job, their long-term prospects at the company plummet.  Office skills tests improve the long-term potential of each employee.

People can be let go for a variety of reasons, but lack of office skills shouldn’t be among them.  When you test candidates, you know which ones will quickly pick up your company’s workflows, which increases their chances of succeeding in their jobs and keeping them. This lowers your company’s turnover rate and cuts the time you spend recruiting and hiring new employees.

You might think office skill tests cost too much or take too much time to create and administer.  However, compared to the time, money, and resources spent training and compensating for unskilled employees, office skill tests are a drop in the expense bucket and a no-brainer when it comes to the investment of time.