A Complete Guide to Assessments
A single bad hire can impose significant costs on your business. CareerBuilder estimates that one poor hire can cost your company up to 30% of their salary in lost time, productivity, and hiring resources. The damage to employee morale and customer satisfaction can be even larger, if harder to calculate.
How can companies prevent this from happening in the first place? Pre-employment tests and talent assessments can help you find the right candidates the first time, as well as offering many other benefits. This guide will take you through everything you need to know about assessments: what they are, why you need them, and how to use them successfully.
What Are Pre-Employment Tests?
Pre-employment testing, also known as talent assessments and pre-hire assessments, is a way to test if applicants actually have the skills needed to perform a job. It sounds simple: many, if not most, jobs have clear tasks to perform and skills needed to perform them. But it’s much more complicated in action, as many hiring managers and HR teams don’t truly understand the skills and aptitudes that predict success in the role, and often don’t know exactly how to select people with the right skills.
Fortunately, this is one area where hiring has evolved significantly in the past decade. There are now more sophisticated employment tests and testing platforms available to help companies make better hiring decisions faster and more equitably as well. Best practices for pre-employment testing have been assessed and refined as well. We’ll cover all of that and more shortly.
Benefits of Pre-Hire Testing
Talent assessments and pre-hire testing offer many benefits to both employers and potential employees.
Faster Time-To-Hire
Hand-screening hundreds of applicants is time-consuming, especially for small recruiting teams or ones with limited resources. Pre-employment tests can help recruiters and hiring managers make decisions faster because they deliver data on the candidate’s suitability fast. With the more accurate data on skills and aptitudes that these tests provide, employers can make those faster decisions with more certainty as well.
Increased Objectivity
“People like the consistency of screening procedures. It gives you an objective piece to look at,” says Rob Altmann, research psychologist for NCS, a test publisher for workforce development and clinical products in Minnetonka, Minn. “If people do interviews without anything else and then in three months are asked what the applicant said in the interview, they have trouble remembering. When you have the results of the test, you can put it in a file.”
Find More Candidates Who Are a Good Fit
Traditional hiring practices like resume screening can leave out candidates who don’t have the perfect hard skills or work experience, but who could be exceptional employees with just a little training. In tight labor markets, finding these employees can be even harder, but pre-employment tests measure what’s really important (and also let your company know where new hires could use more training).
Assess Complex Skills and Aptitudes
Some necessary skills are difficult to assess when just looking at a resume or on a quick phone screen, but can be more easily revealed with talent assessments. Soft skills such as leadership aptitude and personality traits are better measured through pre-hire testing. They’re also more efficient and can be more fair as long as you use tests that are designed to be bias-free.
Give Deeper Insights Into Employee Success
Does your company really know what makes a candidate a great hire, not just today but also ten years from now? Talent assessments allow you to track your success over time across a huge variety of variables so you can continually refine your hiring process. Jeff Johnson, a managing director at Deloitte, found that using the same skills assessment to hire writers over a number of years left him with highly accurate and actionable data. “I didn’t have to worry much about job specifics on the resume. The process itself told me if someone would be good.”
Types of Pre-Employment Testing
There are several different types of pre-employment testing—you can use just one, or incorporate several into your hiring process as your needs dictate.
Skills Assessments
These tests assess if a candidate has the skills needed to perform the job before they’re in the job, preventing applicants from lying or exaggerating about their skills and potentially uncovering skills they didn’t think to mention. They include two different types of skills that are important to test for.
Hard Skills Tests
Hard skills tests measure how applicants are skilled in concrete tasks like using different kinds of software, speaking a certain language, or copywriting. Ideally, you should test for only required hard skills so you’re not ruling out people who could be taught a specific skill, for example, how to use a type of software.
Soft Skills Tests
Soft skills tests focus more on behaviors and personality traits that are less tangible than hard skills, like empathy, problem-solving, and communication skills. But that doesn’t mean they’re any less critical. In fact, since they’re harder to train for, they’re more important to measure during the hiring process with assessments. Just be sure to avoid these soft skills testing issues.
Job Knowledge Tests
Job knowledge tests measure a candidate’s theoretical knowledge about their field. While skills tests measure discrete skills, job knowledge tests are about measuring how they apply those skills and their knowledge in the role.
Personality Tests
Personality tests measure how a person will fit in with the rest of the team and organization, at least in theory. While they’re not sufficient to determine whether a person is a good fit on their own, they can be a good complement to skills testing to get a well-rounded view of a candidate. Often, many questions used in personality tests will also overlap with soft skills tests as they have a lot in common.
Cognitive Ability Tests
These assessments measure a candidate’s mental ability: how well they can solve problems, acquire new knowledge, and adapt to new information. Assessing someone’s mental ability does not always directly relate to job performance, so it’s important to be strategic here in tying results to job requirements.
Physical Ability Tests
For some jobs, the ability to perform physical tasks is essential (think firefighters or construction workers). These tests assess their ability to do the required tasks. However, legally these tests can walk a fine line between assessing and discriminating against disabled people, so use these with caution and the advice of your legal team.
When is the Best Time to Use Pre-Employment Testing?
Adding in pre-hire assessments to your talent acquisition process is a great idea—but where exactly in the process do they work best? The answer depends on several factors, like the role you’re hiring for and the tests you’re using.
After the Initial Resume Screen
While it might seem counter-intuitive, it’s actually more beneficial to screen first for soft skills once you’ve gone through the (virtual) stack of resumes. Why? Because soft skills are harder to train for, and also more transferable between positions. These skills are vital for success in any role, and so it’s recommended to screen for them first.
Before Making Hiring Decisions
Once you’ve screened those initial candidates for their soft skills and potentially conducted further steps, like phone interviews, it’s a good time to check out their hard skills to assess if they have what it takes to succeed. This is especially important if there are skills that candidates must have—if not, you should consider offering more training to otherwise excellent candidates.
When Not to Use Assessments: At the End of the Hiring Process
While it might seem tempting to use talent assessments to make the final hiring decision, this is actually not an effective strategy. They should be used to help you narrow the field in the initial stages to gauge who is qualified, and then you should progress on to interviews to make a final, human-led choice of the ideal candidate. Hiring assessments are a way of gathering more data about candidates, not for making higher-level decisions like who to hire.
How to Use Talent Assessments Effectively
Now that you know all the benefits of pre-employment tests and how to use them, how can you most effectively implement them as part of your talent acquisition strategy? Here are a few suggestions.
Set Strategic Goals First
Testing every applicant for every skill you can think of is wasteful of everyone’s time—and your company’s resources. Instead, begin the process of adding pre-employment testing by developing a strategic plan for them.
For example, what business goals are you trying to achieve by including talent assessments: increase retention rates, improve hire quality, or finding enough qualified people for roles? Once you’re clear on why you’re adding assessments, you can design your assessments accordingly so they provide the most value for you.
Also, it’s easy to get caught up in looking for the “purple squirrel”: that imaginary perfect hire who scores at the top of every needed soft and hard skill and is a terrific cultural fit besides. It’s better to prioritize what you absolutely cannot live without, and then if applicants have other helpful skills it’s a bonus.
These best practices will also help you to create assessments that are short and simple to complete instead of taking half an hour or longer, which negatively impacts the candidate experience. While you want to get enough data to make better hiring decisions, you also don’t want to turn off top talent before they’ve even had an interview with an overly long assessment. Cangrade’s Pre-Hire Assessments, for example, take just 14 minutes to complete.
Legal and Other Concerns
There are many upsides to using talent assessments in your hiring process, but there are also a few potentially serious issues to be aware of with them as well: legal, reliability, validity, and validation concerns. These are all avoidable if you approach assessments strategically and with these concerns in mind.
The legal concerns in particular should be carefully assessed. Whilethey’re not a reason to avoid using pre-employment testing, it does mean you should get HR and legal input into the program design so you get the full benefits without any legal drawbacks. For example, be sure not to ask questions that could collect information about age, race, gender, or other illegal considerations, or that indirectly reveal protected information.
Also, if used improperly, pre-hire assessments can hurt your diversity and inclusion efforts (much like any hiring tool). If you’re not using an assessment tool, like Cangrade, that is certified bias-free, you could be introducing bias into the hiring process and limiting your candidate pool.
Track Test Success
One of the especially great things about talent assessments is the wealth of hiring and employee data they provide you with—not just for immediate hiring needs, but also for future consideration.
Keep close tabs on the hiring metrics you’ll gain when you implement pre-hire assessments, like how your quality of hire rate performs before and after and new hire retention rates. These metrics will give you a good indication of how well your assessments are performing at picking the best people who will contribute and stay with the company for the long haul.
Update Tests Regularly
If one or more metrics are not improving as you’d hoped, you can always tweak your assessments to make them more tailored to your company culture or your open roles, for example, and see if that does the trick. You’ll never get a 100% new hire retention rate,, but it should go up once your assessments are in place.
Also, you can use the data from your assessments to further refine the qualities that you find are essential for success in specific roles and in your company overall. Let’s say you discover from your assessment data that problem-solving skills are actually very indicative of success in roles where you didn’t think they were critical, like junior marketing roles. You can adjust your assessments for those roles accordingly to keep improving the fit of the people you bring on board.
Your hiring assessments should not remain exactly the same year after year, as the skills needed for roles change at least a little regularly. Keeping your tests up to date ensures that your hiring practices are always as effective and accurate as possible.
Next Step: Finding Your Talent Assessment Technology Partner
While there are a lot of things to consider when adding pre-hire assessments to your TA strategy, fortunately, there are now many tools on the market that can assist, no matter the size of your company or how many positions you need to hire for.
If you’re looking for the right technology to make your pre-employment testing effective, easy, and bias-free, Cangrade has you covered. You can even try our Pre-Hire Assessment to see for yourself.