Using Pre-Hire Assessment Tools Effectively: Best Practices for HR Teams

Hiring a new employee is a big decision, with potentially major ramifications for your company and your team if you hire the wrong person. That’s why many companies are using pre-hire assessments — tests that help you determine whether an applicant has the hard and soft skills needed to succeed in the role. 

These pre-employment tests can come in many forms (psychometric assessments are very commonly used), but they all have one thing in common — you need to choose the right pre-hire assessment tool to make your testing and results effective for everyone to use. Here’s what you need to know about using pre-hire testing, and how to pick the right tool for your organization.   

When to Use Pre-Hire Assessments in Hiring 

Pre-hire assessment tools can be used in several stages of the hiring process. You can have a large pool of applicants take a more generalized version to narrow down your applicant pool right away — this is especially helpful if you tend to get a high volume of initial applicants. 

Or, if you typically have a larger pool of applicants who seem qualified after an initial round or two of screening, you can use a pre-hire assessment at that stage to further evaluate them. The best timing truly depends on what your unique hiring process looks like — when is most helpful for your HR team and hiring managers to have those results and data to make decisions?

How to Use Pre-Hire Assessment Tools Effectively 

After determining when you should use pre-hiring testing, you also need to implement using them so you get the most accurate and helpful results, without adding bias to your hiring process. Here’s how to use pre-hire assessment tools to their full capabilities. 

Customize Based on Role 

The pre-hire assessment tool you choose should allow you to customize your assessments based on the role you’re hiring for. For example, you need to test for different skills for a marketing director than a software developer, so having the ability to customize each assessment easily will give you much more helpful results. 

Interpret Data 

Any hiring test will tell you how candidates scored — but only more advanced tools will let you know what those results really mean. For instance, what do their responses mean for how they’ll fit into your organization, or their long-term retention? Pre-hire assessment tools like Cangrade will give you all of this information and more so you can make a hiring decision based on a complete view of the candidate. 

Leverage Data Across the Hiring Process 

While pre-hire assessments are just one step in the hiring process, that doesn’t mean the data you glean from them can’t be used across multiple steps of the process. If you use a pre-hire assessment tool like Cangrade, for example, you’ll automatically get structured video interview questions based on a candidate’s responses on the pre-hire assessment. 

Don’t forget to use pre-hire testing best practices too for more effective hiring. Looking for more ways to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your hiring process? Try Cangrade’s certified bias-free Pre-Hire Assessments and see how we help you optimize your entire hiring cycle.