When it comes to hiring new employees, exercising a bit of caution always comes in handy. That’s exactly why we have pre-hire assessments!

Pre-hire assessments are an objective, standardized way of gathering data on candidates during the hiring process. Professionally developed and well-validated pre-employment tests have one thing in common: they are an efficient and reliable means of gaining insights into the capabilities and traits of prospective employees.

When looking to hire the best talent, a normal CV screening and interview process may not be reliable enough because some candidates can include misleading information, in order to land the job.

A pre-hire assessment is one of the best objective ways of predicting job performance and company fit. Candidates can be assessed on a wide range of parameters such as cognitive ability, critical thinking skills, personality, preferences, and motivation, amongst many others.

Many companies use pre-employment tests to make better and informed hiring decisions.

The publisher of the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) test, states that 89 of the fortune 100 companies use their personality tests to better assess candidates.

Let’s understand pre-hire assessments better and how they can help companies hire premium talent.

How Pre-Hire Assessments Can Help The HR Get Quality Talent!

Here are some of the reasons why implementing a pre-hire assessment could help a company get better employees!

1. They Are Objective:

Pre-hire assessments are a great tool to make better hiring decisions because of their objective data. They provide you with standardized, useful insights on candidates and predict job performance and company fit.

The overall productivity and effectiveness of your team increases, if you use this data to identify and hire the right candidate.

Candidate skills which might not be visible during normal interviews can easily be assessed through them, such as; strategic thinking, subject-area knowledge, confidence, problem-solving ability, leadership quality, agreeableness, helpfulness, analytical skills, productivity, initiative, people-skills, reliability, positivity, empathy, collaboration etc.

2. They Increase Employee Retention:

Employee retention is one of the major concerns for companies today. Pre-hire assessments give you a better chance to decide if the candidate is likely to stay in the role and fit in with the company culture.

Factors that can be considered while deciding on a candidate could be; passion for learning, overall ambition, communication skills, collaboration skills, curiosity etc. People who are not a correct fit will eventually leave, which makes replacing a bad hire expensive and time-consuming. To avoid the hassles, rely on pre-assessment tests, to only select people that align with your needs.

3. They Increase Legal Defensibility:

Pre-employment assessment tests are completely legal to use as long as they are job-related.

This actually gives companies a better chance to defend their hiring procedures if someone questions the legality of their hiring process.

How to Choose Hiring Assessments That Work for You?

There are different assessments instruments designed specifically for the goal that you want to achieve through these tests, like staff retention, productivity, employee engagement, etc. In order to get the best results, applying the four V’s will help you understand which hiring assessments will work best for you.

1. Vision:

What is the objective behind picking out an assessment test? Keeping an objective in mind will help you determine what you want to measure and predict with the help of an assessment test.

Think more critically about why you are using a particular tool. The reasons should not be that everyone’s using it or its cheap, be very clear about what you are trying to achieve.

2. Validity:

Check the validity of the assessment test to understand how impactful they are in their ability to predict job performance. Some tests are better predictors than others.

While employees rely heavily on least predictive measures such as interviews, reference checks, four-quadrant personality tests, and emotional intelligence tests; assessments with higher validity include mental ability tests, integrity tests and multi-measure tests which incorporate a variety of measurements.

Out of all the tests, a mental ability test is the single best predictor of job performance. Coupling one or two tests together will also help largely to get a robust picture of the candidate and help in the hiring process.

Four quadrant personality assessments in which people are classified as some combination of four different options are most widely used tests by employers, but they should be used for team building and coaching and not for the hiring process.

3. Verification:

Once you have gained clarity on the goal you are trying to achieve and the type of assessments you want to use, the next step is to shop from amongst the thousands of vendors in the market.

Any pre-hire test must be reliable, meaning they have internal consistency, and retest reliability – the likelihood of results being the same as the first time it was taken.

4. Value:

The test you choose should be able to garner the results that you were trying to achieve. You should be able to see the value gained through validation studies that the use of a particular test is statistically correlated with what you want to predict.

Assessment Tools That Are Proving To Be Effective Recently!

Here are some assessment tools that you can use for effective hiring!

1. Leadership Assessments:

Organisations are increasingly shifting focus towards getting an idea of a candidate’s personality traits and motivational drivers, instead of only measuring competencies and experiences, especially for executive and middle-management positions.

When candidates in such positions fail, it is mostly because of lack of ethics or emotional intelligence and less due to technical skills. Employers also have to check whether the candidate fits a culture of ethical responsibility, transparency or diversity. Therefore, there is multiple matching that is to be done, not just for the skills and knowledge but also what the candidate’s values are and how they align to the profile.

2. Using Artificial Intelligence:

AI is also being used as a part of assessment tests by vendors. One such use is scoring the result of unstructured questions being asked to candidates like a free-form response to a text message.

For humans, deciphering the same data for each candidate may prove lengthy and cumbersome and delay bulk hiring.  The algorithms used in AI also predict the likelihood of the success of a particular candidate based on their past performance in the same industry. AI is used as a supplement to human judgment about candidates.

3. Candidate Friendly Assessments:

Applicant-friendly tests have gained momentum since the candidate friendly job application processes have gained steam.

Top vendors understand the importance of moving capable candidates quickly through the hiring funnel while preserving the validity and reliability of the tests. For example, video interviews have largely become acceptable within companies, to help candidates and companies avoid the hassles of synchronizing schedules.

Given the war for talent, it is imperative for companies to be cautious about their methods of hiring, lest they are saddled with a bad hire! Pre-hire assessments are one way to make sure you get the best out of the lot!