6 Benefits of Using Pre-Employment Tests in Your Recruitment Process

Cover letters, resumes, reference checks and the interviewer’s gut feel might have been how companies hired in the past. This method of sifting through potential candidates has proven to be less efficient. Candidates can falsify their skills and work experience and even impress an interviewer, which could then result in an unsuitable hire. One way to keep your hiring process as objective as possible is to use pre-employment tests.

You now have access to a wide range of tests and questionnaires that are designed to evaluate candidates’ cognitive and critical thinking abilities. These tests can also be used to assess the skills, knowledge and even the personality of the candidate. CPI, the publisher of a popular Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) personality test, states that 89 out of the Fortune 100 companies use the MBTI test before hiring a new employee.

The benefits of employing pre-employment tests in your hiring process are many and varied. 

1. Streamlines the hiring process and saves time

The number of applicants for a job posting have drastically increased over the years. This means that recruitment teams are swamped with resumes and often struggle to sift the right candidates from resume spammers who send out their applications to every open position out there. When administered at initial stage of hiring a.ka. top of the hiring funnel, efficient pre-employment tests allow you to identify serious applicants when they take the effort to appear for the test. Applying a cut-off to invite candidates for interviews significantly reduces the number of candidates your recruitment team has to assess. This helps streamline your hiring process and significantly reduces the time spent on hiring.

2. Increased employee retention and reduction in turnover

Pre-employment tests can be used to assess your candidates skills as well as their personality. Hiring a person with a wrong temperament who doesn’t fit in with the rest of the team can affect team morale and result in attrition. When you hire employees with the right attitude and personality, they are more likely to be absorbed into the fabric of your organisation. This in turn increases retention.

3. More objective and hence legally defensible

Any process that relies on objective data is likely to be fair and reliable. Pre-employment tests ensure that the data you collect about candidates are standardised and insightful. This ensures that you are using objective data in your hiring decisions. An added advantage is that your hiring decisions are legally defensible by virtue of being objective and fair.

4. Reduces bias in hiring

Bias in hiring is one of the major reasons for wrong hiring decisions. Interviewers are often susceptible to biases like affinity bias, stereotyping and halo effect. This skews the entire hiring process, affecting your inclusion and diversity aspirations. Introducing pre-employment tests in the hiring process ensures that your selection process is unbiased.

5. Improves quality of hire

Pre-employment tests are intentionally created with a focused objective of being able to identify candidates with suitable skills for specific roles. This allows recruiters to identify the best candidates early in the recruitment process and improve the quality of hire.

6. Increases overall productivity

When the quality of hire increases, it positively impacts productivity. Pre-employment tests can be designed to measure communication skills, logical reasoning and even personality traits like loyalty and honesty.

You can choose from a wide variety of tests and can even customise the tests to suit your specific industry or organisation. However, whichever test you choose to employ, make sure that they are standardised. In other words, the candidate’s scores should be comparable and valid.