Recruiting has become challenging because there is a worldwide talent shortage of more than 85 million people, and many employees do not have the critical skills employers need. It is not unusual for companies to get hundreds of responses to a job posting and find that few applicants have the required skills.
As a result, businesses are implementing pre-employment skills assessment solutions. Instead of spending hours reviewing resumes and applications, they can instantly see which applicants are qualified.
What Are Pre-Employment Skills Tests?
Pre-employment skills assessments give HR professionals an easy and efficient way to evaluate candidates’ knowledge, skills, and abilities.
Companies that use an industry-leading pre-employment skills testing solution like the eSkill Talent Assessment PlatformTM can access a library with hundreds of validated subject- and job-based skills tests. HR teams can use pre-prepared versions as-is, eliminate questions that are not relevant to the job, and define difficulty levels for questions.
They can also build custom assessments by selecting questions from multiple pre-employment skills assessments and adding their questions. For instance, if a recruiter is hiring a web developer, s/he can choose questions from the eSkill Web Developer skills test to evaluate applicants’ ability to build and manage websites, the Web Developer assessment to assess creative and design skills, and the Quality Assurance Tester assessment to verify they know how to test, troubleshoot, and solve website issues.
How Do I Evaluate Pre-Employment Skills Assessments?
Many business leaders ask what they should look for when evaluating pre-employment skills assessments. The answer varies because organizations have specific and unique requirements. If Company A and Company B post a Customer Service Supervisor job, many core job requirements will probably be similar. However, there will be differences because the companies are structured differently and have different business goals and objectives.
These are features you should look for while evaluating pre-employment skills testing solutions.
How Pre-Employment Skills Testing Helps You Make Better Decisions
Hiring errors are every business leader’s worst nightmare because they are expensive, hurt team morale, and affect productivity. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, a bad hire can potentially cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, including recruiting expenses, incomplete projects, staff disruption, loss of customer goodwill, and potential litigation costs.
The following scenario shows how pre-employment skills testing helps you minimize the risk of hiring mistakes.
Logan, the HR manager for a food processing facility, needed to fill a quality control manager. He posted the job, reviewed resumes, and quickly created a shortlist of promising candidates to interview.
Mitch emerged as the top candidate because his resume listed the right skills, and his experience included similar experience at leading food manufacturing companies. When Logan asked him why he was exploring new opportunities, he said he was not being challenged in his current role and wanted access to more training and development prospects.
Feedback from Lianne, the hiring manager, and prospective team members was positive, and references from Mitch’s past managers and colleagues were excellent. Logan was sure he had found the perfect candidate, and he offered Mitch the job.
It soon became obvious that Mitch had lied on his resume and during interviews. The company missed several production deadlines because he did not follow basic industry procedures. Several product batches had to be discarded because he made critical mistakes during QA testing.
Lianne and Logan sent Mitch to training workshops so he could acquire the skills he needed. Unfortunately, nothing worked, and push came to shove when an order for a key customer was ruined because Mitch did not run the correct QC tests. Mitch was terminated.
If this company had used pre-employment skills assessment to screen candidates, Logan would not have included Mitch on the shortlist because his skills test results would have shown he was not qualified.
Get Started with Pre-Employment Skills Assessments
Everything operates smoothly when the right people are in the right jobs. A McKinsey study shows that if you replace 20% of the average talent on a project team with top talent, the project will take less than two years to complete if the team is 400% more productive and less than a year if it is 800% more productive.
Do you want to see how a leading pre-employment skills testing solutioncan help you up your hiring game? Contact us to request a demo.