Are you tired of spending thousands of dollars hiring new employees, only to have them leave a few short months later? Has high turnover hindered your ability to adequately serve your customers? Would you like to implement proven strategies that will significantly enhance your ability to make the right hires?
If so, then this guide is for you. Below, we examine the pitfalls of traditional hiring practices and discuss how you can hire better, smarter, and faster.
The Problem: Traditional Hiring Practices
To solve your hiring woes, you must understand what is causing them in the first place. However, that is often easier said than done, as talent acquisition challenges can be linked to various issues.
First, the nation faces a global talent shortage, which makes it difficult to find well-qualified individuals to fill vacancies. In response, some businesses have relaxed their screening standards, which has increased involuntary turnover due to low job performance.
However, involuntary attrition is not the only type of turnover plaguing businesses. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, businesses across many industries experienced historic turnover in 2020. The average turnover rate was 57.3%, including voluntary and involuntary attrition. Retail, construction, and transportation industries were particularly hard hit.
While the talent shortage and the Great Resignation can certainly impact your hiring ability, these issues are also beyond your control. Therefore, we recommend focusing on aspects of hiring that are within your sphere of influence, such as which screening practices you utilize.
Like most businesses, your organization probably relies on some combination of resume reviews, checking references, and in-person interviews. But what do these screening practices tell you about your prospective employees? The short answer is — not all that much.
Sure, you can verify past work experience and get a fairly accurate assessment of an applicant’s interview skills. Unfortunately, this information does not mean that they will be a good fit for your organization.
The Answer: Pre-Employment Assessments
If interviews and resume reviews are not the answer, how can you effectively screen employees and make better hires? The solution is pre-employment assessments. Unlike antiquated hiring practices, these assessments provide your HR staff with in-depth insights into applicants’ skills, abilities, job knowledge, and personality traits.
Pre-employment testing solutions allow your hiring team to make data-driven decisions based on quantifiable information. These screening tools take the guesswork out of hiring, which means that you can select the most qualified candidates every time.
What is a Pre-Employment Assessment?
Pre-employment assessments can be grouped into two categories. The most common type of pre-employment screening tool is a skills test. As the name implies, skills tests are designed to measure a candidate’s skills and abilities. Your HR team can use these assessments to gauge job-specific abilities, more general skills, or both.
Skills tests are available for various industries, including healthcare, education, retail, accounting, engineering, and many more. In addition, there are aptitude and abilities skills tests that can be used to assess a candidate’s soft skills. A few examples of these assessments include Numerical Reasoning, Logical Thinking, and Attention to Detail.
In addition to skills tests, behavioral assessments can be implemented as a pre-employment screening tool.
Behavioral assessments are unique in that they reveal information about a candidate’s personality, such as what motivates them. In-depth behavioral assessments are becoming a staple of modern hiring practices as they allow employers to identify which candidates will be a good cultural fit for their organization.
Benefits of Pre-Employment Assessments
With pre-employment assessments, your hiring team can transition from subjective screening practices such as interviews to relying on hard data that reveals a candidate’s strengths and weaknesses regarding a particular position. This information access means that they can make wiser hiring decisions consistently.
In addition to paving the way for better hires, pre-employment assessments also allow your HR team to screen applicants more efficiently. This efficiency means that you can fill vacancies faster, which will lead to greater profitability and less lost productivity. Shortening your average hiring cycle will translate into significant cost savings as well.
If your organization utilizes behavioral assessments in conjunction with skills tests, you can also take steps to protect company culture. Your hiring team can identify applicants who are the best cultural fit for your organization.
As an added benefit, a pre-employment assessment helps insulate your organization from civil liability. HR staff can retain the results of pre-employment skills tests. If a previous applicant or employee complains of unfair hiring practices, your HR team can reference this information.
Pre-Employment Assessment Solutions From eSkill
Request a demo to see how pre-employment assessments can help you hire make better hiring decisions.