The 3 Main Benefits of Pre-employment Testing

An article by Bryan No Comments

If you ask any job seeker, nobody is hiring. If you ask any hiring manager, they can’t hire fast enough.

As the economy continues to recover more and more jobs will need to be filled. According to a recent study by Deloitte companies are finding it harder to fill positions today than it was just four years ago.

Pre-employment testing provides a way for employers to qualify new job applicants before an in person interview is even scheduled. According to a recent study by Glassdoor, usage of these pre-hiring assessments have increased by 50% from 2010 to 2014.

Here are three primary benefits we pre-employment testing can offer your company.

1. They Save You Time On Screening Resumes

The average corporate job posting gets 250 resumes in response. If a hiring manager was to spend just one minute reviewing each resume, that would be over 4 hours of screening before the interview process would begin..  

However, the average time a company spends reviewing each resume is about 6 seconds. And while the resume is still the standard to assess whether a candidate is qualified or not, these 1-2 page static documents are obviously not the most efficient ways of understanding whether a candidate is qualified for the job opening you have.  

According to business leaders like Bill Gates, resumes can contain superficial information that doesn’t actually correlate with a successful hire such as your college or major. That’s why leading companies are moving to Skills based hiring and there’s signs this type of hiring can help reduce the tech talent gap.

2. They Help Prove Candidate Skill Sets

In today’s competitive economy, leading companies like Google are less interested in things like GPA and education, instead they want to know if you can problem solve or possess the skills required for the job.

According to all the data collected by Google, GPA, education and interviews don’t correlate with whether or not an employee is successful on the job.

Instead many companies are turning to “skills based hiring” and there is even a whole new educational industry supporting the new skills-based hiring trend. Dev Bootcamp for example, allows anyone (with or without a college degree) to learn web development skills in as little as 3 months before their graduates land a new job in the tech field.

Skillshare, Udacity, Udemy and Lynda.com are all online platforms that help candidates develop new tech skills. And while completing an online course doesn’t prove you are ready for a job, a pre-screening tool like Wellhire can help employers understand where the candidate stands on various skills.

Udacity has skills badges. And while badges are great they still don’t provide the real-time proof your company can assess with a quick pre-employment test.

3. They Self-select for Committed Candidates

With online job boards it’s become extremely easy for candidates to send of dozens of the same resume and cover letter without truly having an interest in those positions.

 There are over 400,000 new resumes being posted on sites like Monster.com each week. That’s an overwhelming amount of new candidates for recruiters and hiring managers to effectively screen themselves.

Pre-employment testing is one of the best way to narrow a pool of candidates because when a prospective employee completes an online skills assessment they have already proven they are more committed to your company regardless of the test results.   

The ‘perfect candidate’ has to have the right skills, experience and personality fit, but they also have to be truly interested in working for your organization. And while nobody has developed the magic formula for hiring the right candidate there are a variety of tools and best practices that can give your company an edge in the war for talent.  

Have you used skills assessments in  your hiring process? We’d love to hear your experience below.