There are a lot of different ingredients that are required to create a successful business. However, one of the most important is a skilled team of employees.
No matter the size of your business, you need skilled and professional members of staff to be successful.
Did you know that every bad hire costs a business around $15,000? That’s the sort of money that no business wants to throw down the drain!
This shows why it is critical to get your hires right the first time around. However, the trouble is that most employers are not trained in interviewing, job posting, and ultimately, finding the best person for the job.
So, you need to put the odds in your favor, and one of the ways you can do this is with pre-employment skills testing. Below, we will reveal exactly what this is, as well as five reasons why it is important in the recruitment process.
What is pre-employment skills testing?
Before we can delve deeper into the benefits of pre-employment skills testing, we need to understand exactly what this is.
Skills testing is a critical part of the hiring procedure through which businesses test their candidates’ skills.
It is a successful way for companies to make certain that the candidates they are considering have the required skills for the role in which they are hiring.
It strongly shows the applicant’s ability to carry out the role effectively and perform well should your business hire them.
Businesses regularly use skills testing to narrow down their pool of candidates that have made an application for the vacancy they have available. Once they have done this, they will invite the remaining candidates for a job interview.
Five reasons why pre-employment screening makes sense for your business
Now that you have a good understanding of what pre-employment skills testing is, let’s take a look at five of the main reasons why this is important for businesses.
1. Reduce the amount of time it takes to find the perfect hire
One of the most significant benefits associated with pre-employment skills testing is that it makes it a lot easier for you to find the right hire for your business. You can reduce the time to hire considerably.
Firstly, you are going to spend less time on candidates who are not qualified. Using pre-employment skills testing in the hiring process enables you to filter out candidates who are unsuitable before you even check their resumes.
When you consider the fact that 85 percent of people have stated they have lied on their resume, pre-employment skills testing becomes critical in terms of filtering out these candidates and ensuring you do not hire someone who has lied about their skills and experience.
With pre-employment screening, you can narrow down your candidates and streamline the hiring process, without wasting resources and time.
Your hiring team will have much greater focus, as you can focus on the best candidates by ranking every applicant automatically so that your hiring personnel have the ability to review, rank, and organize your entire candidate pool with only a few mouse clicks.
Reducing the time spent on your hiring process is significant. After all, time is money! The time you have saved can be spent on other, more fruitful areas of your business and the hiring process, such as training new employees.
2. Hire better candidates with pre-employment skills testing
Another benefit to consider is the fact that you are going to be in a position to hire much better candidates with pre-employment skills testing. This is what it really comes down to! After all, businesses would be nowhere without their employees, and so it is critical to make sure you have the best possible team behind you.
With pre-employment skills testing, your recruiters will be able to assess the skill sets of all candidates. Looking for talent based on their resume alone can be very challenging because a lot of applicants will embellish their skills or fabricate their experience.
Even if your candidate pool is made up of individuals who are honest and upright, research clearly shows us that we cannot predict the skills a new hire has by simply looking at their experience alone.
In fact, multi-measure tests have been shown to be the best approach when it comes to predicting on-the-job success when compared with job experience of reference checks.
3. Lower the amount of money that you spend on recruitment
All businesses know just how important it is to keep their costs as low as possible! If you make the wrong hire, it can end up costing you a lot of money.
Not only will you have lost the money spent on recruiting that person, but you are going to have more time without the skilled person you need, which can mean your productivity and quality levels are halted while you wait for someone qualified to step into the role. This can also cost your business money.
There is no denying that making the wrong hire is very expensive! However, with pre-employment skills testing, you have an effective way of keeping these costs as low as possible.
As already touched upon, you will select the best candidates faster, therefore, lowering the time-to-hire.
In addition to this, with pre-employment skills testing, you will make fewer mishaps, meaning you are going to spend less money and time on replacing candidates. As a consequence, your recruitment budget will go a lot further by embracing pre-employment skills testing.
4. Deliver an exceptional experience for candidates
If you speak with a lot of job hunters today, you will see that a lot of them feel like traditional hiring processes are very unfair and that they often do not end up getting a fair chance of being considered for the job.
There can be bias embedded into the hiring process without employers even realizing that this is the case.
Thankfully, pre-employment skills testing can help you to boost the candidate’s experience. Candidates can have the satisfaction of knowing that they are going to receive a fair shot to win the job. They know that they will be assessed on their skills, and their skills alone, in order to progress to the interview stage.
If a candidate is not qualified for the role that is available, it is better for everyone that you do not waste their time with a drawn-out hiring process.
Furthermore, there are some platforms that will enable you to generate reports that you can give to candidates who are not successful. This is something that is greatly appreciated, as candidates will be able to assess their limitations and review their skills so that they know how to give themselves a better chance of being hired in the future.
5. Reduce human error and mistakes
The final reason why we recommend pre-employment skills testing is because it will help you to eliminate human error when analyzing skills.
In any role, mistakes can happen, and recruitment is not immune to this. Reducing these errors is vital, as this will lower unnecessary company expenses.
With pre-employment skills testing software, subjectivity is removed from the candidate assessment process.
Rather than simply relying on intuition, interviews, or resumes, a candidate’s level of skill can be quantified, and this will result in a candidate evaluation process that is a lot simpler and more straightforward.
Human error also comes into play when scoring tests. If you are going to administer tests manually, errors can occur when accumulating data from candidates and calculating scores.
This is why we highly recommend that you look for quality pre-employment skills testing software, as this is going to give you the best chance of reducing human mistakes and errors.
Choose a pre-employment skills testing platform with care
Of course, to experience all of the benefits that we have discussed, you do need to choose pre-employment skills testing software with care.
Make sure the platform has received positive reviews and that it offers good customer support.
If you have pre-existing tests that you want to use within the platform, it is important to find a solution that enables you to do so.
You also need to think about what anti-cheating measures are vital to you, and what sort of tests you want to use to evaluate candidates for the openings you have available.
Naturally, you will also want to factor in the sorts of openings you tend to be filling.
Final words on using pre-employment skills testing
Pre-employment skills testing is a vital part of the recruitment process. It can help you to reduce business turnover, the average time to hire, and the cost of hiring someone.
While this can help you to improve the recruitment process considerably, you also need to focus on other key areas as well, including avoiding bias, ensuring your recruitment procedure is a reflection of your brand, and the candidate experience.
If you can master the recruitment process at your business, you can give it the greatest chance of success.
Authored by Jessica Casares, Content Partnership Specialist, Skale