According to recruitment firm Robert Half, it takes companies an average of six weeks to make a new hire. During this time, HR employees must sift through hundreds of applicants, scanning resumes and other supporting documents.
Once teams identify potential candidates, the interview process commences and proceeds until top job seekers emerge. Hopefully, this process ends with a new hire.
Even if you do everything right during hiring, it is still possible to end up with a mismatched employee, which can dramatically impact your workforce. Once the employee comes on board, you may notice any number of problems, including:
Any of these alone can be a problem. Employees with a poor Job Fit, or a poor match to the needs of the position, frequently present issues that can quickly make the rest of your workforce less productive.
Luckily, skills tests and behavioral assessments from eSkill can help you avoid bad hires by providing you with the information you need to find the candidate best suited to the job—in other words, the candidate with the best Job Fit.
Let’s look at some of the ways you can make better hires using our quality pre-employment assessment tools.
How Much Does a Mis-Hire Cost You?
It can be hard to know exactly how much it costs your company when you make a bad hire. Some factors are obvious, like sunk salary costs and the cost of finding a new employee. These are not incidental figures, with the Department of Labor suggesting that they can cost upward of 30% of the bad hire’s salary.
However, other costs may be less obvious. Lost productivity can be a significant drag, both from work left undone by the bad hire and the extra effort the remaining staff has to put in to cover for their mistakes.
You may also lose customers or clients, and your business must write off the resources spent on training and onboarding someone who does not pull their weight.
Instead of focusing on the financial impact of a bad hire, focus instead on the institutional impact. A workplace is a kind of ecosystem, and when it is disrupted, it can take a while to heal.
During that time, productivity drops. If the situation is not carefully managed, you may find that other workers also decide to leave. The human cost can quickly turn into even more financial strain.
Behavioral Assessments Can Help You Avoid a Bad Hire
Integrating a behavioral assessment for employment into your hiring process effectively increases your likelihood of making a sound hiring decision.
While it is easy to focus on hard skills like computer programming and math, soft skills are just as important, according to 92% of hiring professionals. That is why measuring these soft skills is so important.
Behavioral assessments for employment focus on how job seekers respond in certain situations, allowing you to gauge their behavioral and communication skills, interpersonal style, and how they think.
eSkill’s behavioral assessment includes measures such as stability, tenacity and work ethic which have been shown to correlate with success in many roles.
Combining a behavioral assessment with skills tests will give you even more valuable information about your prospective hires. eSkill has a library of more than 800 pre-made skills tests, organized by subject and job. You can also create a customized test, handpicking questions from all the available skills tests to develop an assessment tool specifically tailored to your job search.
This flexibility means you can combine hard and soft skills in the same assessment, giving you a complete picture of each potential hire.
These assessments can be powerful indicators of future performance and their potential fit within your existing work culture. Both of these factors should help you hire the right person.
Using Behavioral Assessments and Skills Tests to Find Candidates with the Right Job Fit
Behavioral assessments are especially useful when used in conjunction with other skills tests. eSkill offers users a talent assessment platform with customizable skills tests and validated behavioral assessments. In addition, you can also add simulations and video response questions.
Simulation tests allow you to simulate situations that employees would encounter as part of their work, using the applications they would use in real life. You get to see not just their final results but also all of the steps they took along the way. This testing modality gives you a great deal of insight into how the candidate thinks and their overall comfort with certain applications.
Video response questions allow you to observe the candidate’s verbal communication skills and personality. Video question answers are recorded so hiring teams can evaluate each response asynchronously using the criteria you define.
Making a poor hire can have effects that linger for years. Let eSkill help you avoid mis-hires and make skills testing and behavioral assessments part of your HR process.
Interested in Using Behavioral Assessments to Avoid Making a Bad Hire?
Learn how eSkill’s behavioral assessments and skills tests can help you find the best candidates for your open positions. Request a demo today.