Pre-employment skills testing candidates can save your business time and money. These savings are exponentially increased if you are doing high volume hiring like third party staffing companies. Like other business decisions though, if you lack a detailed strategy for skills testing you could be missing out on substantial profit saving opportunities.
Consider the following tips to improve your strategy and increase your bottom line with the right talent the first time you hire:
Check out how this company saved 64% in selection costs with online skills testing for employment.
An “off the shelf” solution for your pre-employment skills testing is hindering your opportunity to specifically assess skills relative to your positions and culture. Each organization is different in a variety of ways so you should be using a customizable solution that allows you to build your assessments around what’s relevant to the position you are hiring for.
Even though it is an option to test candidates on devices in your office, or even with hands-on items (like the company I used to hire for that required applicants make a clay mold of a tooth), allowing candidates an easy, quick option to complete an online skills test for employment from the same device they are using to apply for a position with your company will speed up the process tremendously. 45% of candidates are applying via mobile devices so if your assessment platform isn’t mobile friendly you could be missing out on a lot of talent!
Indeed conducted research that showed applications with more than 20 screener questions experienced a candidate drop off rate of 40% or higher. Take the time to choose meaningful assessment questions to provide the most relevant data without making the application process so onerous that potential talent doesn’t get around completing it.
Executing your skills testing early on the process will narrow down the candidates that your team has to review, saving time and labor costs. just be sure you are using a fully compliant test product that’s not biased against groups of people. Because of our quality predictive content, millions of candidates have been tested since 2003 with a perfect compliance record.
Now that you have an unbiased skills assessment tool, take the opportunity to advertise to candidates beyond your usual audience. using test results to qualify candidates can assist your recruiting team and hiring managers in avoiding some of their unconscious biases. Looking beyond names, addresses, or even history and directly yo test results may have your organization considering applicants it would have previously overlooked.
Another reason to have a customizable option is because your business is changing. As your jobs evolve, update your skills assessment accordingly. Using outdated assessments could result in outdated hiring decisions that can turn into costly mistakes.
Use your current hiring process to baseline your hiring data so that you can quantify the savings your organization experiences, as you work through these tips to improve your skills testing and assessment strategy.