The hiring process and employment testing are two of the most important contributors to overall company culture, but the interview stage itself can be very costly, both in terms of time and financial investment.
Even the most advanced AI resume screening and candidate questionnaires can only provide a glimpse of candidate experience and aptitude. This is the primary reason to implement pre-employment assessments in your hiring process.
Not only can pre-employment testing be useful in predicting job performance, but it can give valuable insights into the core skills and abilities of potential candidates.
We’re going to look at ways to add a talent assessment process before any hiring decisions and provide hiring managers with a way to make an organization’s hiring process much leaner and more effective.
5 Ways a Hiring Assessment Can Benefit Your Team
This list of benefits certainly isn’t exhaustive, but it will give you an idea of what improvements or changes you may see after instituting talent assessment tools for job candidates as part of the interview process.
Higher Quality Hires
One of the biggest benefits of using pre-employment tests or job simulation tests is the ability to pinpoint potential best talent both in the context of quantity and quality. This will ultimately serve the organization throughout the pre-employment phase by reducing costs and creating a more streamlined hiring process.
This means that by the time your hiring managers become personally involved, they have a far more limited pool of potential employees to wade through. They will be presented with a shortlist of skilled candidates that are likely to be a good fit for the team and the company and will have the skills and personality traits likely to bring value to the organization.
Drop in Turnover Rate
The turnover rate for companies that rely on sales can be one of the most costly things to deal with. Not only in the context of trying to reduce costs, but also in the training costs often lost when some.
There’s also another reason that efforts to reduce turnover are so crucial: morale. The morale of the team is often severely damaged when a coworker turns around and leaves shortly after being hired. By assessing candidates’ performance potential and soft skills with a personality assessment process, you can eliminate the potential for a bad hire immediately.
Additionally, employment testing allows you to make sure those with personality assessment results indicating a good match for the team and the company’s culture are put at the front of the line. This leads to more employees who make their job a top priority, which means better employee retention.
Improved Productivity
Research has shown that properly implemented, and well-developed, pre-employment tests can identify an accurate prediction of the best candidates.
This improved productivity often directly results from having more successful hires in the position. These quality candidates have been shown to have the personality test and aptitude test results that make them the best talent for the job.
In a sales-based production environment, for example, this tends to lead to higher productivity overall. This higher productivity has the positive impact of leading to more sales.
Smoother Hiring Process
One of the biggest challenges to the recruitment process is how long and resource-intensive it can be. On average a newly-posted position will take about 45 days to fill, and only a small portion of job openings find the right candidate within the first month.
This isn’t because there aren’t people applying for jobs, the problem is the enormous pool of potentially qualified candidates that do apply. This makes it incredibly challenging for hiring managers to easily regulate applicant flow and identify employee candidates in a massive number of applications.
Setting up opportunities for the applicants to narrow themselves down before they even reach the point where a human looks at their resume is crucial to making the hiring process simpler. Not only can setting up pre-employment tests, like a talent assessment, and cognitive ability test provide the hiring team with objective data about the candidates, but they can also serve as a barrier to screening out a less-qualified candidate based on the scores.
Better Team Synergy
In many cases, resumes and interviews are poor predictors of how someone will fit in with your team. This is something that can be determined, however, by having personality tests for potential new employees, so you can gather as much relevant information as possible during the recruitment process.
This data can be used to identify candidates’ Myers-Briggs-type indicator profiles. This is a scientifically validated way to ensure that your selection process leads to the right candidate for the job. One who will not only be a cultural fit but a smart talent acquisition for your entire team dynamic.
Common Pre-Employment Tests
Cognitive Ability Tests
Cognitive ability tests, also known as general or specialized aptitude tests, are a common way for talent acquisition teams to measure verbal reasoning, math skills, and more.
Some of the more extensive cognitive tests deal more with memory, problem-solving, and even attention to detail, or numerical dexterity.
AI Video Screening
Asynchronous interviews, or video submissions, have grown in popularity considerably. This is where applicants record themselves answering questions, and it allows interviewers to evaluate them at their leisure. AI facial recognition can be used to provide insight into the applicant’s tone, vocabulary, and more.
Sample Work Completion
Work samples are pieces of actual work that a potential employee will need to complete. For those in the SEO industry, this could be keyword research, or writing an optimized Amazon listing.
Doing a little bit of the job they’ll be expected to do later is a great way to see concrete results of their potential job performance. The biggest challenge with work samples is that candidates shouldn’t feel like they’re being asked to work for free at their interview.
Live Job Trials
Like job trials are on-the-spot evaluations of a necessary job skill by the interviewer or hiring manager. This is the classic, “sell me this paper” or “sell me this pen” situation. It’s a simulation of the actual job ahead.
A more modern version of this is the evolution of situational interview questions, where potential employees are given hypothetical situations and asked about their reactions.
Problem Solving Games
One of the leading methods of sparking engagement is gamification. In some cases, interviews may have a group interview phase, and this will often include some form of game or similar competition.
Gamification can even be done with online employment testing exercises. This not only creates a more engaging situation overall, but it drives healthy competition, and the scoring provides an easy way to objectively measure performance.
Common Issues With Hiring
Finding the Right Candidates
Even when a candidate is open and honest on their resume or CV, avoiding actual lies, many will still make misleading statements. Pre-employment testing will often be able to weed out applicants like these.
Sometimes, even when candidates have the hard skills that will be needed, they lack the soft skills that make them an asset to your existing team. This can sometimes happen due to a simple personality mismatch when hiring decisions are made.
Getting a Feel For Backgrounds
A common challenge in the hiring process is getting a feel for the background of a candidate. This means that hiring managers lose out on valuable insight into the personality and motivation of their candidates.
Long and Painful Process
Traditionally, hiring is a long, painful, and costly process that results in the need for additional training costs and skills development. In the 30-90 days it can take to fill a job vacancy, the organization loses out on the capacity created by that job opening. The shorter the hiring cycle can be made, the less of an impact the vacancy will have on the organization.
Wrong Fit for the Role
Occasionally, employees are identified as simply being a wrong fit for the role they are currently filling. This can be because proper talent assessment tools didn’t highlight their lack of knowledge, or it could be that the job simulation they took part in was just not realistic enough. There are countless ways that a bad hire can make it through, but pre-employment testing and talent assessment is
Personality Traits That Don’t Mesh With the Team
One of the big reasons that many teams face challenges is because there is a personality mismatch. Talent assessment tools can help your organization evaluate skills and talents but often cannot quantify the signs or symptoms of someone with an incompatible personality.
Let The Brooks Group Help With Your Hiring
If your sales organization needs a well-rounded suite of pre-employment tests to help predict job performance and measure communication skills, working with The Brooks Group can lead to incredible results.
We have over 40 years of experience in the sales industry and are capable of providing training to groups of any size. We can tailor our training methods to any industry or specific company culture goals you want to meet.
Reach out today, and a member of The Brooks Group team will work with you to provide customized training to the sales team, as well as to help with a myriad of goals or training. We offer services such as negotiation training, customer service training, hiring assessments, workshops & seminars, and more.
