What You Learn From Employee Self-Assessment and Pre-Employment Tests
Need to make some quick hires but are afraid you won’t hire the right employees in the process? Integrate employee self-assessment and pre-employment tests into your hiring process. You will get to know your candidates better.
Employee self-assessment and pre-employment tests can help you get to know someone’s attitude, personality type, and their work style. They can tell you if a person is suited to the position they are applying for, if they will fit on your team and company culture, and can serve as an onboarding tool to assist the candidates in their own self development.
Here’s what you should know about both self-assessment tests and pre-employment assessments.
Hiring Challenges
As a recruiter or hiring manager, you have likely run into two major issues while hiring. The first is candidates who are not honest about their qualifications. The second is candidates who are qualified but not a team player.
Dishonest and Unqualified Candidates
Candidates lie. In fact a recent survey revealed that as many as 78 percent admit to misrepresenting themselves when applying for a job. While many of the untruths may be exaggerations managers can let slide, many others turn out to be a difficult or wrong hire.
While many of these candidates may be “good” people, the exaggeration of necessary skills and the willingness to deceive are likely huge red flags for you as a hiring manager.
Skills-based and personality assessments can help catch these dishonest applicants. Weed them out before you get to a serious stage of the application process.
Qualified Candidates With Difficult Personalities
Sometimes, you come across an extremely qualified candidate. They went to all the right schools, have the right training, and have an impressive CV. You may not realize until too late that they are either unwilling to work hard or are difficult to work with.
Workers who do not pull their weight or make things difficult for their co-workers. It is essential to screen them out as early as possible.
You can use pre-employment testing to get a better idea of their work attitudes, integrity, and personality fit. These tests reveal how well they will mesh with existing workers’ personalities and “play well” with others.
The Benefits of Hiring the Right People
The main benefit of integrating objective data into your hiring process is that you gain more information about how likely they are to be successful in the job before you put them on the payroll.
There is a significant financial cost of investing in the wrong person. Profits are lost during the time that person was under-performing. More is lost during the time that it takes to hire a new person to fill the role, which is 42 days on average.
Hire smarter with the results of an pre-employment assessment. You are able to avoid the major hiring challenges of unskilled candidates or difficult personalities by identifying them early in the process and moving on to better candidates faster.
Pros of Employee Self-Assessment
Besides screening out poor candidates, assessments can also help identify the strengths of qualified candidates. This makes it easier to compare them.
With skills-based testing, you can assess for specific skills (perhaps those lacking in your organization) and hire based on these.
Assessments allow recruiters and hiring managers to spend more quality interviewing time with the best candidates. They help improve the interviewing skills of even novice or infrequent hiring managers. Employee assessments encourage you to focus on not only the strengths but areas of concern and vulnerable job fit scenarios.
As remote work becomes the rule rather than the exception, employee assessment can be a time-saver for both yourself and the candidate.
Workers are changing careers in record numbers. Skills-based testing can help both of you identify the skills they have that are transferrable between both industries. This can help clarify whether or not they will be a strong contender in the hiring process, despite their newness to the industry.
Cons of Pre-Employment Tests
It’s great to get objective data about your candidates from these assessments. However, many hiring decisions will still require a more holistic assessment.
Pre-employment tests should never be replace the interview and reference checking. They just make traditional hiring tools better. People are complicated. Jobs are becoming more complex. Hiring right is both art and science. There is no such thing as a “perfect score” in an interview or on a pre-employment test. Assessments are just one piece of the hiring puzzle.
Skills-based pre-employment testing such as typing, data-entry, or proficiency with Office365 will also only show you whether or not a candidate is capable of doing the task portion of the job. It won’t give you much insight into their personality fit or work style. It won’t tell you if the new hire will be reliable, honest, and conscientious. It is best to pair skill testing with a more personal assessment or spend significant time in person with this candidate.
Instead of using pre-employment tests to hire the perfect employee, use them to screen out “bad apples” or unskilled candidates and expose potential shortcomings, personally or team fit. Then use them to enhance more traditional hiring assessments such as the interview and reference check.
Choosing the Right Employee Assessment
Depending on your field, you may need to administer one or more different tests. Some pre-employment and employee self-assessment examples include the following. Consider which would be best for you and your hiring process.
Office Skills Test
Need to ascertain that someone is experienced with basic office software and technology? Administer an office skills test. You will know ahead of time if your candidate is capable of filing, answering phones, multi-tasking, or using software.
Leadership Tests
Hiring for a managerial role? Give a leadership test to see if this candidate will be a good fit for being a leader in the future.
Innovation and Creativity
If you are filling a role where you need someone who will think outside of the box, administer an adaptability, innovation and creativity test. This will help you assess whether or not the candidate will bring the right mix of fresh ideas and creative thinking to the position. Whatever skills you are looking for, there are assessments that can help you see whether or not your candidate would be a good fit. From knowing their way around the C-Suite to writing a specific coding language, an assessment will clarify their value to your organization with objective data.
Recruit Faster, Hire Smarter, Learn Better
Hiring does not have to feel like a shot in the dark. Instead, use employee self-assessment and pre-employment tests to get data from your candidates and help make a decision based on evidence and numbers.
Want to learn more about how you can recruit faster, hire smarter, and learn better? Get in touch with Successful Performance Solutions today to learn more about pre-employment assessments and how they can improve your hiring process.