How to Make Pre-employment Testing Part of the Candidate Experience

What is pre-employment Testing?

Pre-employment testing allows a business to provide potential candidates with a series of questions and tasks to assess their suitability for a specific role. Cutting out elements of human error and unconscious bias, pre-employment tests assess personality traits and characteristics, cognitive abilities, language, job knowledge, behavior and skills.

As of 2020, 80% of Fortune 500 companies were using pre-employment testing, with that number only expecting to grow. Perhaps more than ever before, businesses need to hire the right person the first time. Especially as the cost of recruiting a bad employee is sitting at around 30% of that employee's salary. Which, for many businesses, is less of a mistake and more of a threat.

In many ways, pre-employment testing can bring value to your hiring process, as well as how to ensure the process is fun and engaging to your candidates.

How Pre-employment Testing is Reshaping the Hiring Process

Pre-employment screening is all about refining the hiring process, so that you, as a business, don’t waste time with unsuitable candidates and can make more informed decisions. Tests provide objective results that are much more tangible for comparison with other candidates than personal preferences and emotions. 

At the same time, the pre-employment tests don’t replace the human to human connection required for a successful interview. But rather, they support it.

The key to utilizing pre-employment testing to its fullest capacity is establishing which desired skills, traits and behaviors your business needs. This can be down to the style of business, as well as the requirements for the role in question. The more you know about said role, the better pre-employment screening will integrate into your hiring process.

Ultimately, with a more streamlined process for hiring, turnover decreases, productivity increases and morale improves. What’s more, as a hiring manager, you can make decisions on hiring with far more confidence and peace of mind.

Improving the Candidate Experience

Many hiring processes are rife with multiple stages, pointless questions and repeated information. 78% of candidates in the hiring process believe that the hiring process is a reflection of how the company values its employees. With skills shortages flaring up across the globe and a great battle for top talent raging, your business can’t afford to put candidates off with a poor hiring process.

While pre-employment tests are becoming more popular, there are some candidates who find not just pre-employment tests stressful, but the hiring process as a whole. The key to creating a pre-employment test that works for your business is to keep the candidate journey in mind. Design it around your brand and the type of candidate you’re looking to hire. Not only will this inform the candidate all about your business and help them to learn more about you, but it will set apart unsuitable candidates.

But pre-employment screening doesn’t stop there. The number of businesses hiring remote workers globally is growing rapidly, due to the many benefits it presents. Pre-employment testing allows you to test candidates from around the world, 100% online, in bulk. If your business is not limited to location, pre-employment testing could allow you to find the perfect candidates in places you may have never even considered.

Pre-Employment Testing Reduces Legal Risks

As with any process, there is the potential that candidates may appeal your decision in court. However, pre-employment tests actually reduce the legal risk to your business by ensuring your decision is made based on concrete information, rather than personal bias.

In fact, pre-employment testing can remove a great deal of bias from the hiring process, if set up properly. Essentially, minorities and protected groups can be chosen on the merit of their skills, abilities and cultural fit.

We have now looked at why pre-employment testing is important and how it can be integrated into the hiring process, as part of the candidate experience. 

We now want to tell you about how Pipplet can assist in this process. 

About Pipplet

Pipplet is an innovative platform that helps you to streamline the recruitment process and make pre-employment language testing a meaningful part of the candidate experience. As the world grows more connected day by day, many roles require candidates to have appropriate language skills. Pipplet accurately tests this. With many businesses feeling overloaded with applications, Pipplet’s language testing can quickly turn a pile of candidates into a neat row of suitable hires.

With the ability to choose from various packages, your business can use Pipplet to recruit for any role, whether you have one vacancy or hundreds. Sign up to Pipplet today to find out more about how we can take care of your pre-employment testing needs.

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Photo credits: Pexels, Tima Miroshnichenko