You are missing the most effective interviewing technique if you are not using pre-employment testing.
Changing laws, a leaning towards databased hiring decisions, and emerging technologies are redefining how companies make employment decisions. At the heart of this evolution is pre-employment testing that helps employers determine with reasonable precision the best employee fit for their companies. This is a huge departure from the way employers used to make hiring decisions in the past when recruiting the best candidate depended on the ability of the interviewer to read beyond the statements, qualifications, and a candidate’s ability to manipulate an interview to their benefit.
Below are some of the trends in pre-employment testing that are redefining how employers make hiring decisions.
1. A Shift towards Cognitive Tests
Personality testing is losing its allure as a key pre-employment test. It does not predict with any accuracy a person’s ability for critical thinking or to quickly learn the tasks of a job. To hire high-performance employees, objective pre-employment tests have become quite popular with employers. One such is the cognitive and simulation tests that evaluate a candidate’s ability to perform or quickly learn on the job. Together with knowledge, work sample, and simulation tests, cognitive tests are more reliable than structured interviews when predicting the chances of an employee’s success at a job.
2. Fast and Easy Testing
As the private sector continues to grow, thousands of new jobs are created every year. Leveraging on best practices in hiring means employing tools that make hiring decisions fast and easy. With limited budgets to hire and train dedicated HR personnel to administer pre-employment tests and conduct in-depth interviews, companies are turning to tools offering off-the-shelf assessments that can commence and conclude applicant testing in a matter of minutes.
3. Mobile Testing Set to Rule
Its thumbs up for mobile testing as 77% of people between 16 and 34 years conduct job searches using mobile devices. With this kind of statistics, most Fortune 500 companies will have to style up as only 10 percent of them have mobile-friendly application processes. For the 10% offering mobile application platforms, even less are offering mobile assessments. Also to style up are the pre-employment test providers who need to develop assessment platforms that work seamlessly on most tablets and mobile browsers. Pre-employment testing applications will have to work on mobile platforms, otherwise, the majority of prospective employees will be left wondering why your company is using archaic technology.
4. Use of Social Media to Screen Candidates
Increasingly, employers are turning to social media to screen candidates. Smart candidates are aligning their profiles with a view to keeping them optimized for employers snooping for the best candidates. Although employers cannot legally access a potential candidate’s social media account, posts and comments left on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and other social media platforms can help an employer make a hiring decision. It is important to keep your social media research about a potential candidate legal to avoid discriminating a candidate on the back of protected information. For this reason, only conduct a social media scrutiny on a candidate after the interview.
Hiring the right employee used to be a tiring process involving numerous face-to-face interviews. Despite the rigorous interviewing processes, hiring the right employee was always at best a hedged gamble since most of the data and information available were not easy to interrogate and ascertain with any degree of accuracy.
However, today’s pre-employment tests apply predictive tools that go beyond stated qualifications and predict with near accuracy the suitability of each candidate. Assessments like The Predictive Index eliminate guesswork out of recruitment decisions to deliver pre-qualified interview candidates, increasing the chances of hiring the right employee for your company.
