Many of your organization’s current hiring challenges may be due to the unprecedented global talent shortage. This talent shortage makes it harder to find quality candidates, and you may feel you have no choice but to take your chances with the second-tier applicants you would not hire under normal circumstances.
While these fringe candidates could become quality employees, hiring them involves a great deal of risk. If your hiring team chose correctly, you have found a “diamond in the rough” and filled an important position. However, hiring the wrong candidate has the opposite effect. Bad hires are costly, negatively impact morale, and can alienate customers.
Fortunately, your organization can overcome many of the issues created by the talent shortage by leveraging skills assessment tests such as customer service skills tests. These tools have helped organizations worldwide address staffing and client retention concerns and guide hiring, training, and promotional decisions.
Avoiding Mis-Hires with a Customer Service Skills Test
If you have recently made a bad hiring decision, you are not alone. According to a recent survey, almost half of organizational leaders admit to having made at least one bad hire in the previous year.
Many of these bad hires resulted from the idea that filling vacancies with anyone who seemed reasonably qualified was better than carrying vacancies. However, that is simply not the case. A bad hire can diminish staff morale, negatively impact the quality of your work environment, contribute to customer churn, and increase employee turnover.
Customer service skills tests help you avoid these headaches by enabling you to make informed decisions. Your hiring team can gather quantifiable data on candidates and use the information to hire more efficiently. This streamlines your screening process, makes it possible to instantly identify top candidates, and helps you minimize bad hires.
Skills assessment tests can also help you overcome the talent shortage by enabling you to evaluate non-traditional candidates. Many organizations are finding it better to focus less on factors such as total job experience, resume quality, and interview results and to base hiring decisions on the applicants’ measurable skills.
Use Customer Service Skills Tests to Create Your Own Talent Pipeline
Although customer service skills tests can help you tap into the available talent pool more effectively, the talent shortage will still impact your ability to fill vacancies. You can leverage skills assessment tests to maintain business continuity and fill essential vacancies. This means using customer service skills tests as part of your employee training program to build and nurture a talent pipeline.
Investing in employee training allows you to transform individuals with entry-level skills into more versatile professionals. The biggest challenge associated with employee training involves determining what abilities employees have mastered and where they have knowledge “gaps.”
The first step is to identify training needs by administering skills tests to determine each employee’s needs. Then you can tailor training programs to each employee. This customization ensures that training efforts produce a good return on investment and aid in the development of participants.
You should use hard and soft skills tests when creating your training program. Hard skills tests measure core customer-service-related abilities such as problem-solving and interpersonal communication. Conversely, soft skills tests like Attention to Detail and Emotional Intelligence measure abilities that are not job-specific but are essential to an employee’s success.
To maximize the effectiveness of your training program, use skills tests before and after participants complete the program. Pre-testing serves as a benchmark to show you where an employee started, and post-testing will show you what they learned and how much information they retained. You will also gain valuable insights into how you can improve the program.
You can use the same process for succession planning and promotion decisions. Your HR team can administer skills tests that measure leadership abilities. The results will show which employees are ready to step into a leadership position and those who could with additional training and development.
The Importance of Choosing a Reputable Skills Assessment Test Provider
Skills assessment tests can significantly improve the effectiveness of your hiring process, training programs, promotions, and succession planning. However, your assessment program’s potential value and impact depend entirely on the quality of the tests you use.
You will want to partner with a reputable testing solutions provider like eSkill. Our skills test content is written and validated by subject matter experts, and our user-friendly platform is precisely what you need to hire smarter, train better, and identify your next generation of organizational leaders.
Do you want to see first-hand how skills assessment tests can help you improve hiring and training outcomes? Contact us to request a demo.