Hiring new employees can be a harrowing experience! As the saying goes, “One bad apple can spoil the barrel.” You’re risking a poor culture fit, an under-skilled employee, and even the chance of falling for fake credentials. Expansion is essential for company growth, so how do you get around the risk?
Pre-employment assessments are designed to streamline the hiring process. They determine potential candidate's skills, personality traits, abilities, and characteristics – before you consider adding them to your workforce. These standardised tests confirm that candidates possess the necessary skills to be successful in the role. They’ll also indicate whether they’re likely to align with your organisation’s culture and values. Pre-employment assessments can be valuable in decision-making and help you enhance team dynamics and create a productive, inclusive environment.
In this ultimate guide to smarter hiring, we’ll talk about the different types of pre-employment assessments, their many benefits, implementation best practices, and real-world success stories.
Understanding pre-employment assessments: Types and benefits
The different types of assessments
There are a few types of pre-employment assessment tests. Each one will evaluate a different facet of your candidate.
Behavioural assessments measure a candidate's strengths, areas for improvement, and communication style. This test will help you understand how a candidate behaves, what motivates them, and how they deal with conflict.
Personality assessments give insight into how suitable a person is for the role. They are a good indicator of workplace success. This test measures the candidate's resilience to stress, how open they are to change, and their competitiveness level. Based on these traits and behaviours, you'll get an idea of how well they'll fit into your organisational culture.
Aptitude assessments gauge a candidate's general intelligence and mental capacity. They provide insight into abilities like reasoning, perceptual speed, number speed and accuracy, word meaning, and spatial visualisation. This test will help you determine which candidate will perform the best, measuring competency for the role and cognitive skills like problem-solving and critical thinking.
Emotional intelligence assessments measure a person’s ability to perceive, understand, and handle emotions. This test determines how someone deals with conflict and confrontation and how they will interact within a team. Recruiting emotionally intelligent candidates develops effective teams and creates engaged workplaces.
How assessments can streamline hiring
Pre-employment assessments simplify and speed up the hiring process. They are non-biased and objective, expediting candidate screening and reducing time-to-hire. You’ll be able to make informed recruitment decisions, saving you time and resources.
Boosting candidate experience and employer brand
A well-structured assessment process enhances the candidate experience and boosts your brand. Providing potential candidates with clear expectations fosters a positive perception of the company, no matter the outcome. A streamlined process means internal efficiency. Here are a few best practice tips to strengthen your brand and attract top talent.
Pre-employment assessments: Best practices
Choosing the right test
Bombarding candidates with a barrage of unnecessary assessments is counterproductive. Select tests that align with your company’s goals and according to the role you’re hiring for. For example, it might be important that your candidate is a good culture fit, but is it necessary to assess numerical ability for a creative role?
Choosing the right time
At the beginning of the recruitment process, make candidates aware of what assessments will form part of the interview process and their purpose. Consider incorporating various rounds of hiring. For example, perhaps an aptitude test in round one will be used to weed out unsuitably skilled candidates, and a behavioural test at a later stage will be used to determine culture fit.
Interpreting results
Pre-employment assessments create an unbiased, even playing field for all prospective candidates. Still, they should never be the only determiner of a candidate's suitability. To interpret results accurately, you'll need a nuanced understanding of the job requirements and an overall view of the candidate's profile. Take all the information into account, with the end goal of finding a harmonious match between the candidate, the role, and the organisation.
No matter how you decide to incorporate assessments, ensure all pre-employment assessments are valid and reliable.
Overcoming common challenges with pre-employment assessments
To alleviate candidate concerns, it's important to communicate transparently about the purpose and value of the required assessments. Build trust and credibility by making it known that standardised assessments promote a fair and objective recruitment process. They minimise unconscious bias, fostering diversity, inclusion, and equality. At a company level, make sure all assessments and processes are legally compliant and follow best practice industry standards to avoid repercussions.
Getting started with pre-employment assessments
Thinking of adding pre-employment assessments to your hiring process? Your journey starts here...
First steps and preparation
Begin by setting clear goals and conducting a comprehensive needs analysis. What are your hiring challenges? What are your long-term objectives? What type of role are you hoping to fill? Answering these questions will help you tailor your assessment strategy to your organisation.
Evaluating success and adjusting strategies
For long-term success, continuously re-evaluate your assessment strategy. Be open to adjustments based on feedback from candidates and real-world workplace results.
Selecting a supplier
Choosing the right supplier will give you access to a wide range of reliable assessment tools customised for your industry and various job roles. Consider Thomas, where we’ll help you fulfill your company's potential through a more diverse workforce, effective hybrid working, higher employee engagement, and improved performance. We're trusted by over 10,000 businesses worldwide, including McDonald's, Siemens, SpecSavers, and Porsche, to name a few. For real-world insight into the transformative impact of pre-employment assessments from HR professionals and business founders, click here.
Improving your hiring process with pre-employment assessment
Pre-employment assessments offer many benefits, from streamlining hiring processes to enhancing candidate experience and promoting diversity and inclusion. Consider how pre-employment assessments could be integrated into your hiring processes to enhance hiring decision-making, build strong teams, and support a fair and inclusive recruitment strategy.
As the competition for top-notch talent intensifies worldwide, it’s important to include innovative tools and strategies in your hiring process. Ready to build a confident, efficient workforce? Speak to Thomas to find out how people science can elevate your business.
