How Customizing Pre-Employment Tests Helps You Make Better Hiring Decisions

Hiring mistakes cost the average company thousands of dollars each year. Research shows that if a company terminates a manager who earns $65,000 after 2.5 years of service, it costs around $840,000, including hiring expenses, salary, benefits, severance, reduced productivity, and loss of customer goodwill.

The average employer incurs costs of around $240,000 to recruit and onboard a new hire. If the employee is not a good fit and leaves the company, that money is lost, and the organization must invest additional funds to hire a replacement.

Finding qualified candidates to fill critical positions has become much more challenging during the past couple of years because we are experiencing an unprecedented talent shortage. Organizations need to hire top employees to remain competitive. So, they are implementing pre-employment testing and looking for solutions that allow them to create customized assessments, solutions like the eSkill Talent Assessment Platform^TM.

Why Customizing Pre-Employment Tests is Important

As any HR leader knows, different organizations are structured differently, so a job at Company X will have different skill requirements than a similar position at Company Y. Therefore, standardized pre-employment tests may not be effective in all hiring situations.

How to Customize Pre-Employment Tests

To resolve this issue, the eSkill Talent Assessment Platform^TM offers several customization options so you can tailor pre-employment tests for each of your job roles.

• Revise “Off-the-Shelf” Pre-Employment Tests: The eSkill Assessment Library contains hundreds of validated job- and subject-related skills tests. You can use them as-is or select one that meets your needs and delete questions that are not relevant to the job. For example, if you were hiring an entry-level software engineer with Java experience and felt some of the questions in the Java Developer Skills Test were too advanced, you could delete them.

• Build Multi-Subject Pre-Employment Tests: When you want to assess applicants’ skills in several areas, you simply choose the subjects and set the difficulty level and test length to build an assessment that meets those criteria. For example, assume you were aiming to hire customer service representatives with strong Word® and Excel skills® and needed to ensure they also had basic math skills. In this case, you could build an assessment using questions from the Customer Service, Word, Excel, and Basic Math assessments and set the difficulty level for each question to create a skills test that meets your criteria. You always have the option to review assessments and add or delete questions as needed.

• Build Job Skills Tests by Choosing Your Own Questions: The eSkill Talent Assessment Platform^TM allows you to build customized pre-employment tests by selecting questions from multiple skills tests and adding your own questions. This is an excellent option if you need to test applicants’ knowledge of business or industry policies and procedures that are critical to job performance. For instance, if a manufacturing company is required to have employees and new hires complete safety training, you can choose questions from the Safety Procedures and Workplace Safety Skills Tests and add questions that specifically pertain to your company.

Customization Success Stories

Organizations worldwide depend on pre-employment testing solutions to improve hiring outcomes. The following case studies illustrate how two companies used customization to streamline their hiring and training processes and reduce hiring costs.

• ELIA Transmission Belgium (ELIA)

ELIA Transmission Belgium (ELIA) is an electrical power distributor near Brussels, Belgium. European Union (EU) law requires the company to provide safety training for technicians who work in hazardous high-voltage electrical distribution environments. Test content is very specific to high-voltage safety and quality certification and testing, and certification officers must also import over 1,300 proprietary questions. The workforce includes employees from all over Europe. So, the company offers the test in Dutch, French, English, and eight other languages. Moreover, ELIA uses the eSkill Talent Assessment Platform^TM to create customized skills tests that include its own proprietary questions.

• Ryan LLC

Ryan LLC provides tax consulting and advocacy services to organizations in real estate, oil and gas, business services, transportation, and utilities. The HR team needs to test new hires on multiple subjects and topics. This became costly because they had to pay for individual tests. It became much too expensive when the company needed to have applicants complete up to five assessments for some positions. Once Ryan implemented the eSkill Talent Assessment Platform^TM, its HR team could create one pre-employment test that covered all job and subject areas. This saved the company money and created a better experience for candidates since they were required to complete only one test instead of five.

Customization Improves Hiring Outcomes

Each employer has specific needs, and standardized pre-employment tests are not always practical. Therefore, your organization needs a pre-employment testing solution that allows you to create custom assessments for all your positions.

Do you want to see how customizing pre-employment tests can help you improve hiring outcomes? Contact us to request a demo.