As an employer, you must always try to learn as much information about your prospects during the Hiring process. The issue is that conventional techniques of screening candidates, like resumes and job interviews, frequently don’t provide authentic information.

Resumes are highly unreliable; according to a study, close to 78% and more of them contain deceptive statements and 46% actually tell lies.

Comparable to assessments, interviews, particularly unplanned ones, are arbitrary and, eventually, are poor indicators of work performance. A fair and impartial way to learn about applicants for a position is to use tests that have been properly prepared and verified.

Pre-employment assessments add a level of neutrality to your recruitment process by giving precise information, which can be applied uniformly to all candidates.

Then, with this information, you may make more sensible, well-informed hiring selections.

What are the five principal advantages of pre-employment testing?

Pre-employment tests have many advantages that speed up the recruiting process and boost your company by raising the possibility that new hires will succeed in their roles.

Pre-employment tests can help guarantee that staffing aligns with your company’s goals, such as lowering turnover, boosting revenue, and retaining customers.

The following are the main advantages that your business may gain by deploying a successful staff testing solution:

1.Increased productivity

According to studies, pre-employment tests, which are expertly created and thoroughly verified, can accurately predict productivity levels in a variety of job kinds and sectors.

Since they can unbiasedly ascertain the degree to which an applicant possesses the expertise, capabilities, and talents to function well in any given position, comprehensive and the best pre-employment tests are one of the most successful techniques for forecasting performance.

Let us take the example of a clothes company that wants to increase the sales associates’ productivity (indicated by the volume of merchandise sold each hour).

They administer a simple test to gauge the basic verbal, numeracy, and communication abilities of their employees. The business discovers that employees with excellent test scores generate, on average, $100 of items per hour, whereas those with poor test scores barely sell $0 of goods per hour.

The above observations are made by examining the correlation between exam results and average revenue per hour. To put it another way, individuals who successfully passed the exam produce 20% more than those who failed it.

It is fairly easy to show the significant ROI (Return on Investment) of worker testing when associations between tests and multiple desirable business results — such as efficiency, retention levels, client satisfaction rankings, and training costs — can be connected to one another in a statistical manner.

2.Enhanced employee retention

By making sure that your new hires have both the fundamental aptitude necessary for the position and the best personality or demeanor to feel at ease with the kind of work needed for them, pre-employment tests can boost staff retention.

These elements may lessen the possibility that workers will be fired for subpar performance or failure to complete the instruction (involuntary turnover), in addition to the possibility that workers will leave of their own volition (voluntary turnover).

Let’s illustrate this with the story of a call center in the sector of financial services that use pre-employment exams as a method of lowering turnover.

The organization makes the decision to give a standardized pre-screening test to all new workers and then examine the association between test results and retention levels after five months. This is because, in call centers, employee retention poses a substantial commercial concern.

They discover that employees with higher test results become less prone to being dismissed and less inclined to leave their jobs. Employees with low scores have a higher retention rate than those with low scores.

3.Reduced turnover

Wide-ranging advantages that spread throughout your entire organization can be met by reducing turnover. Lower turnover rates improve employee morale and enhance your business’s standing with the public, which in return makes it simpler for your company to find and hire applicants of a higher caliber.

Additionally, lowering turnover has more prominent advantages for your organization’s bottom line. Recruiting, selecting, training, and possibly severance compensation for the leaving employee are a few costs related to replacing an individual.

According to one research, substituting entry-level staff members will cost roughly 16% of their yearly wage.

For higher-paying roles, this cost will rise even further: replacing mid-level staff members will cost roughly 20% of one‘s annual wage, and replacing high-level executives might cost as much as 200%. As a business owner, you have a strong incentive to seek ways to lower employee turnover.

Let’s illustrate this with an example. A multinational lending company seeks to lower training and hiring costs by raising the caliber of the hired staff members. New hires have to finish a demanding three to four-week training program and then pass a federally mandated license exam. Many new recruits fail the course – necessary to be taken in order to be employed as long-term workers because of the training’s difficulty.

To see if the assessment system can forecast productivity during the initial training, the business decides to give it to a group of fresh hires. They discover a significant link between test results and successfully completing the instruction.

100% of individuals with the top tier of scores finish their program and pass the licensing exam. For categories of new workers who have lower ratings, the success percentages dramatically decrease. Due to the expense and time constraints required to train new recruits, aptitude tests are especially beneficial for a post at this stage.

Conducting this type of exam early can significantly minimize the expenses associated with employee turnover by cutting down on the amount invested in training and hiring people who may be unqualified for the role since aptitude is a reliable predictor of future success.

4.More time-saving and effective hiring processes

Finding a suitable new employee for an old vacancy usually takes six weeks, and the staffing procedure can be highly time-consuming. Yet, as reported by the Center for Economic and Business Research, just 43% of job postings are closed in under one month. The remaining 57% of positions that remain unfilled after the first 30 days are anticipated to do so for at least 90 days.

It’s not because there aren’t enough people; on aggregate, 250 applications are received in response to each online recruitment posting, and data indicates that currently, the average applicant pool size for each vacant position has doubled.

Managing candidate flow and finding the ideal prospects in an ocean of resumes is becoming more and more challenging for recruiters as applicant pools expand quickly. Pre-employment tests can significantly speed up the hiring process if they are included in it.

Pre-employment examinations have the greatest potential for time savings when given at the beginning of the hiring process. You may clear out many “application marketers” who put out their portfolios with little effort or thought by mandating that applicants complete the exams early on. The candidates who ultimately pass the examinations seem, at the bare minimum, interested in your post enough to invest the time necessary to complete the tests.

Setting minimal cutoff scores for some exams can also help quickly reduce the pool of candidates for telephone or in-person discussions.

Research reveals that the typical recruiter spends roughly 63% of their weekly time on the telephone; therefore, reducing interview time significantly decreases the time spent hiring personnel.

In contrast, face-to-face interviews last 30 minutes on average.

Pre-employment tests make it simpler to identify the individuals with the best chance of succeeding on the job, which cuts down on the best chance of succeeding on the job and the number of hours wasted on time-consuming recruitment operations.

5.An increase in the hiring process’s reputability

Pre-employment testing can improve your organization’s hiring process’ objectivity, equity, and legal defensibility in addition to aiding it in realizing gains in various business results. Your company’s selection and promotion procedures should be fair and compatible with the law – irrespective of the industry.

Federal regulations that aim to promote fair and non-discriminatory hiring practices apply to pre-employment testing.

In light of this, several businesses think using employment tests exposes them to more legal risks. However, pre-employment testing and other selection techniques employed by employers are governed by the same rules.

Employment tests can enhance legal defensibility by improving the impartiality of your company’s personnel selection processes. Thus, you must be conscious of the regulatory compliance concerns surrounding employment screening.

In the exceptional situation that a lawsuit against your employment practices should ever emerge, your organization, which has designed testing programs in compliance with legal requirements, will thus be better capable of defending these practices.

Conclusion

Pre-employment tests let you focus on the top prospects early in the hiring process, which raises the quality of hires. This is due to the fact that skill tests are made to evaluate knowledge and skills that are relevant to a particular job, which we sometimes overlook when looking over a resume or speaking with a candidate in an interview.

Teams in charge of recruiting who focus on the quality of hire end up saving their companies thousands of dollars. Finding the correct applicant the first time is crucial for business because each poor hire may cost a firm thousands of dollars annually.

Author bio

Atreyee Chowdhury works full-time as a Content Manager with a Fortune 1 retail giant. She is passionate about writing and helped many small and medium-scale businesses achieve their content marketing goals with her carefully crafted and compelling content. She loves to read, travel, and experiment with different cuisines in her free time. You can follow her on LinkedIn.

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