Pre-employment tests help employers collect objective candidate data early in the hiring process. These assessments include cognitive ability, personality, situational judgment, and role-specific knowledge tests.

Using tests in recruitment effectively reduces the number of bad hires, saving time and money in the long run. However, incorporating Testing into diversity initiatives has its challenges.

Pre-employment testing is a widely used hiring process that provides valuable and objective information for employers. Unlike resumes and unstructured interviews that can be subject to unconscious bias, professionally developed tests and assessments provide data on candidates’ job-related skills, aptitude, personality, and more. This includes basic Excel tests that evaluate a candidate’s ability to manage spreadsheets, analyze data, and utilize formulas—skills essential for many roles in today’s workplace. By assessing these factors, the assessment process helps recruiters and hiring managers identify potential mismatches in the workplace.

Mismatched employees can lead to reduced engagement and productivity in the workplace and, ultimately, to costly turnover. Using tests to identify the right candidate for a role minimizes this risk and improves the organization’s bottom line. Incorporating a variety of assessments, such as those measuring technical proficiencies like Excel, ensures a comprehensive understanding of each candidate’s capabilities, aiding in the selection of individuals who are skilled and a good fit for the company culture and job requirements.

However, a company must be careful to ensure that the types of tests it uses are not biased or can hurt diverse candidates. For instance, cognitive or physical abilities tests can disproportionately screen out minorities if the assessments were initially developed for clinical or educational purposes rather than occupational use.

Examining the diversity of a company’s employee retention data, including who leaves and why, is essential. Suppose a pattern emerges that many employees from historically marginalized groups leave their jobs within a specific timeframe. In that case, this may indicate a problem with the company’s culture or a lack of opportunities for advancement. A diversity analysis tool can help companies compile and analyze such data in a way that is easy to understand.

Preventing Bias

Unconscious biases can hinder decision-making, impact team dynamics, and limit company diversity. Hiring diversity in the workplace services is a great start to increasing awareness and they can help with monitoring and tracking certain behaviors. Training, coaching, and mentoring opportunities can help people recognize when their biases influence their decisions and how to avoid them. Leadership involvement is also crucial to reducing unconscious bias.

Examples of bias include affinity bias (favoring others similar to oneself) and beauty bias (discrimination based on physical appearance). Gender bias can also affect hiring practices, such as selecting male candidates over female candidates with similar work experience and skills. Other shared preferences include the horn effect (assuming that one failure means future failure) and the halo effect (assuming that positive characteristics lead to success).

Preventing bias starts with understanding what it is. There are many ways to reduce it, such as using blind hiring software during interviews or removing names from resumes for reviewers, conducting phone or video interviews instead of face-to-face ones, and ensuring that interviewers have different genders present. Also, try to spend time with various coworkers to build cultural competence. The more varied the experiences you have in your team, the more open you will be to new ideas and perspectives. Lastly, avoid making decisions quickly and be careful not to make snap judgments.

Increasing Efficiency

It’s no secret that making bad hires costs companies money in the short term (think replacement hiring, training, and company downtime) and in the long run (when you’re dealing with lost productivity and morale). The good news is that using pre-employment Testing can help reduce these expenses.

By allowing HR managers to narrow the candidate pool through standardized and objective methods, employment testing can help improve the quality of hiring decisions. It also helps to streamline the process by reducing the amount of time and effort that is needed to find suitable candidates.

With a wide range of available test types, including personality tests, cognitive ability assessments, situational judgment tests, and role-specific skill tests, pre-employment Testing, like from Wonderlic, can provide a richer picture of candidates’ profiles by combining multiple test types in one evaluation. This will help HR teams identify and recruit the best talent quickly and accurately while helping to avoid biased decisions due to preliminary assumptions.

Additionally, for roles where employees require physical activity regularly, adding physical assessments to the screening process can ensure that candidates are physically fit and healthy to perform their job. This can reduce workplace injuries and help ensure your employees can function effectively. Additionally, it can minimize hiring and retention costs by providing that you are only hiring the most qualified candidates.

Increasing Retention

Turnover is a significant problem for many employers and can also be costly. Pre-Employment Testing helps increase retention by assisting companies in finding people who are genuinely a good fit for the job. This helps decrease employee turnover and improves company morale.

Personality tests are one of the most popular and well-known types of pre-hire assessments. These tests measure personality traits like honesty, conscientiousness, and risk-taking. While there are some concerns that these tests can be biased against certain groups, if they’re correctly administered and evaluated, personality tests can provide valuable insight into a candidate.

Situational judgment tests are another vital type of pre-hire assessment that can help identify a candidate’s ability to work in various professional situations. These tests ask candidates to solve hypothetical scenarios and answer questions about how they would react in a given workplace environment.

Role-specific tests are unique tests specifically designed for a particular role, industry, or niche. These tests are typically more technical and knowledge-based than the previously discussed test types, and they can help employers evaluate a candidate’s expertise in a specific subject.

Finally, physical tests are a necessary component of any employment screening process. These tests can assess a candidate’s strength, flexibility, and overall fitness. They can be handy for jobs that require workers to perform strenuous activities regularly or if the worker will be operating machinery.