Pre-employment assessment can be a valuable asset in ensuring companies can evaluate and hire the best candidate for a role. These assessments come in many different flavors, including personality tests, skills testing, cognitive ability tests, and much more. By analyzing the candidate in these additional ways, a company can glean a lot of data on how an individual will fit into the company for the role they are being considered for and how long-term they can grow. This will also have the bonus of cutting down employee turnover and saving money!
Benefits of Pre-Employment Assessments in Reducing Turnover
Improved Hiring Accuracy
Hiring is essentially target practice, and as an employer, you want to make sure you hit the mark. This is why a pre-employment assessment is super important, as it gives you the ability to hire the perfect employee who won’t quit at the drop of a dime.
Better Cultural Fit
Every place has some sort of cultural vibe, and a company is no different. Doing one of these assessment tests allows you to see if a prospective employee will gel with the existing vibes and fit right in. If an employee shares the values and goals of the company, they are less likely to be unhappy in said company.
Understanding Candidate Motivations
If an employer understands what fuels a candidate, they can better understand if this fuel is what they need in their organization or not and if it fits with their status quo!
Types of Pre-Employment Assessments and Their Roles
Personality Assessments
Personality assessments allow you to predict who will stay in a job longer. By reviewing which skills, traits, and behaviors actually drive success in a given role.
Skills Assessments
Making sure candidates have the skills that are required to succeed reduces frustration, turnover, and firing people because they can’t do the job.
Cognitive Ability Tests
Cognitive ability assessments measure how quickly candidates can see solutions to problems. When candidates think faster, they perform better because they are able to learn how to succeed more quickly.
Impact on Employee Retention
Enhanced Job Satisfaction
When employees get to use their strengths in their jobs, when they are competent in their work, and when their personality and their environment are a natural fit, they are happy and less likely to quit!
Better Team Dynamics
A workforce is essentially a puzzle piece, and if you add a candidate who does not quite fit into the puzzle, then it is a puzzle that will never get finished. Thus a pre-employment assessment answers that oh-so-important question of whether or not a candidate will be a team player!
Career Development and Progression
Pre-employment assessments can provide insight into candidates’ strengths, areas for improvement, and potential. Organizations can leverage this insight to draw a correlation for growth opportunities.
Implementing Pre-Employment Assessments
Choosing the Right Assessments
Finding the right talent assessment tools relevant for a job comes down to ascertaining certain characteristics, such as the job’s complexity, the organizational culture, etc. To also base the talent assessment on solid science such that it has been validated i.e., the assessment is consistent for the underlying construct that is being measured. This is to keep the assessment process valid and reliable such that it continues to provide a fair and accurate view.
Integrating Assessments into the Hiring Process
The operative term for implementing pre-employment assessments is “seamlessly.” Assuming the assessments have been appropriately chosen and developed, organizations must create a plan that ensures their use at appropriate parts of the hiring process. This includes educating hiring managers on the proper application and interpretation of results and feedback.
Continuous Evaluation and Adjustment
The implementation of pre-employment assessments includes monitoring their use on an ongoing basis — evaluating whether the assessments remain useful, seeking feedback from both applicants and hiring managers, and making changes to each as necessary on an ongoing basis to help guard against employee turnover.
Cutting Turnover with Pre-Employment Assessments
Ultimately, the implementation of pre-employment assessments is a strategic imperative that HR professionals, talent acquisition specialists, CEOs, business owners, team leaders, team managers, and I-O psychologists simply cannot afford to ignore.
Organizations that use pre-employment assessments wisely can finally solve the equation for how to create a more stable, committed workforce. Not to mention hire high-performers who are both eager and capable of delivering productivity and results. This is the foundation for building long-term value and driving sustained organizational growth and success in a constantly changing, dynamically reducing turnover rate!
