Human Resource forms a core part of an organization and acts as a catalyst in sustaining the strength of the business. Even after being such an integral part, the HR department has always remained the least likely aspect of any organization that goes through any sort of reform. Until recent years when technology found a way to penetrate the functionality of this department and transformed the elementary methods by new automated techniques. To be a part of an ongoing global war to recruit the best talent, organizations are bent to restructure their existing fundamentals to revitalize its Human Resource.
At present around half of the current workforce constitutes of Millennials and are predicted to make up 75% in the next few years. This whopping increase in the count of job seekers in the coming years presses on the fact that the time has come when recruiters need to embrace and grow on technological progressions to meet the business requirements.
“48% of human resources and recruiters and managers believe that technology helps them make better decisions.”
How?
Hiring process is lengthy paraphernalia that takes up a lot of time and resources of the recruiters as well as of the organization as a whole. In order to give a direction to this talent search in the wilderness pre-employment testing is used at the very first stage of the recruiting process. These pre-employment assessments are basically used to narrow down the approach by before-hand assessing the skills and suitability of the applicant according to the requirement of the job.
Extensive search for relevant information about the candidates is a critical criterion in the hiring process for any employer. The major problem is that age old methods of acquiring information of a candidate that is through resumes and interviews often fail to yield a verified insight. A research indicates that 78% of resumes are misleading, while 46% are complete lies. The same problem goes with interviews that are not well structured and are subjective in nature being unreliable predictors of job performance. This is the reason why recruitment assessment tools are being preferred in the hiring culture, while other reasons being:
- Saves time on interviews
It is a strenuous task to interview every single candidate who you think is suitable by going through the resume. Resumes can’t be considered as a fool proof method to think of a candidate as a worthy material upon whom you can invest your time and money that goes into the selection process. Pre-employability assessment gives you an in-depth knowledge of the candidate in advance to any process that you undertake in order to take any candidate on board.
- Eliminates bias factor
During an interview process the interviewer is largely subject to 4 types of biases which are:
- Confirmation bias: “This is a tendency for humans to seek out information that supports a pre-conceived belief about the applicant that has been formed prior to the interview. (Phillips and Dipboye, 1989).”
- Affective Heuristic: “This is where interviewer’s decisions are influenced by quick and superficial evaluations, such as: the level of attractiveness of a candidate, race, gender, background, etc.—none of which are relevant to the candidate’s suitability for the role. (Postuma and others, 2002).”
- Anchoring: This bias takes place when the interviewer forms expectations from a candidate by going through the credibility mentioned in his/her resume. This influences the evaluation of the candidate’s performance.
- Intuition: Due to a lack of objective data related to the skills and proficiency of the candidate, selection or rejection on intuitive basis is likely to happen.
With the application of online assessment tools for recruitment, all the above mentioned types of biases gets eliminated from the hiring process, opening a room for objective judgment from the scores obtained on the test.
- Saves overall cost to be drained on bad hire
With the hiring of every single candidate a lot of money is invested in the recruitment, selection and training process. If it turns out to be a bad hire then organization has to face monetary loss and if incurred on a large scale or on frequent basis then it can lead to debts. One study estimated the monetary consequences of replacing entry level employees which costs about 16% of their annual salary, and this percentage is subject to increase with higher paid positions. When a mid-level employee is replaced then it costs about 20% of their salary and high-level executive employees could cost over 200%. To avoid incurring such a huge loss it is recommendable to apply pre-employment testing to the hiring process.
- Behavioral and cognitive traits can be assessed in advance
It is technically impossible to scientifically calculate a candidate’s job related skills and proficiencies with their resumes. Even interviews, no matter how well structured they are tend to loose on scientific verification of competencies. Recruitment assessment platform is designed in a way to seek out relevant objective information, cutting down on any extra crap that can cloud an employee’s judgment.
This technology is a much awaited change, desperately needed in the Human Resource sector to transform the age old hiring structure by the application of a comparatively advance innovation. One study pointed out the whopping estimate for resumes submitted for every corporate job opening which were around 250. Some job seekers who are named as “resume spammers” are defamed for blasting their resumes across the web with no specific intention of acquiring a job. This is the reason why recruiters are unable to tap relevant candidates and deal with around 50% of job applicants who do not meet the basic criteria’s of the job. All of these hurdles severely affect the productivity of an organization. This is the reason why technology has been accepted in this field and is only bound to flourish with a possibility of more advancement.