What is Pre-employment Testing?
Pre-employment testing is any assessment, skills analysis, or screening an organization uses to assess prospective employees.
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Understanding Pre-employment Testing
Before choosing to hire someone, you may put their advertised abilities to the test. Modern-day employers do this through pre-employment testing. Assessments can vary widely, from cognitive assessments to skill-based evaluations, situational judgment exams, and personality tests. All of these help employers judge a candidate’s skills, abilities, and cultural fit before deciding whether to hire them. Traditionally, this testing was used in industrial settings to assess physical abilities. However, today, it is common in many industries, including tech, healthcare, finance, and other specialized trades.
Employers use pre-employment testing such as cognitive assessments and personality tests to predict candidates’ job performance and fit.
Benefits of Pre-employment Testing
Pre-employment testing can be especially beneficial for small businesses that don’t have extra resources to spare when hiring. It helps efficiently identify promising candidates, ultimately saving time and money. Employers can reduce the likelihood of making bad hires by assessing skills and characteristics relevant to a role throughout recruitment. This process improves an organization’s quality of hire, leading to increased productivity, efficiency, and harmony in the workplace.
Pre-employment testing helps small businesses save time and resources, make informed hiring decisions, and improve the quality of hires.
Challenges and Considerations of Pre-employment Testing
There are certainly challenges inherent to implementing pre-employment screens. For one thing, many organizations turn to third-party service providers to administer their cognitive, personality, and skill-based assessments, which may be cost-prohibitive to small businesses. Additionally, these tests can slow down the hiring process by incorporating an additional (and typically asynchronous) step. Finally, tests can come with inherent biases, so ensure fairness in the hiring process as much as possible.
While pre-employment tests have many advantages, they can be costly, increase hiring time, and risk potential biases.
Best Practices for Small Businesses
Small businesses should be strategic from the start to ensure the best possible implementation of pre-employment testing. Begin by identifying the most essential skills or traits necessary for a role and finding assessments that accurately screen for them. Do your best to ensure that the tests are unbiased. Have your hiring team run through the assessments themselves to identify possible unfairness. Maintain direct and personalized communication throughout testing to create a positive candidate experience. Finally, continuously review your testing process to guarantee compliance with legal regulations and accurately assess what you want it to.
Small businesses interested in conducting pre-employment candidate testing should follow the best practices of choosing accurate tests, prioritizing positive candidate experiences, and regularly reviewing the process to ensure fairness.
Pre-employment testing helps organizations hire better by assessing candidates’ skills and cultural fit before giving them an offer. While possibly increasing the cost and time to hire slightly, this kind of testing can benefit small businesses, leading to improved quality of hire and workplace productivity. However, small businesses should still be mindful of implementing these tests, especially to balance costs and avoid biases wherever possible.
About the author
Casey Pontrelli
Casey Pontrelli is a multi-talented professional with a background in content creation, branding, and social media marketing. Whether writing for a newspaper, eCommerce website, B2B startup, or a marketing agency, she has taken her strong background in journalism and turned her focus to SEO and content marketing. She’s written about everything from boutiques to cars to small businesses, and enjoys most when she knows her writing has had an impact. When she’s not writing up a storm or creating attention-grabbing social media posts, Casey enjoys hanging out with her partner and three cats, Eddy, Larry, and Marcus, going on long walks in the Green Belt, and, predictably, reading.
