The purpose of pre-employment testing: What are we looking for?

Marc Benioff (Salesforce.com founder and CEO) once said, "Acquiring the right talent is the most important key to growth. Hiring was - and still is - the most important thing we do." When looking at the impact of hires on a team or a company, one can measure the height of the challenge faced by recruiters face, on a daily basis.

But, despite this seemingly simple premise, finding the right people to fill job roles is no easy task. How do you determine who is a good fit? How do you conclude that their personality will fit with your business ethos or that they possess the situational judgement to complete tasks flawlessly? 

Pre-employment testing can definitely help. 

Find a ‘star employee’ every time

Numerous studies over the years have shown that investing in high performance individuals from the get-go enhances team performance and overall business success. The ‘star employees’ in any workforce across any industry tend to drive a significant proportion of organizational results. In fact, it is thought that the top 5% of outstanding employees account for 25% of organizational output. Imagine if your entire workforce was of that caliber!

But the question remains. How do you find the best of the best? And how do you accurately and tangibly measure their performance, language, and communication style before anyone signs a contract? This is where high quality pre-employment testing comes in…

Back in the day, recruiters were limited to basic software or offline resources to test candidates’ skillsets and language capabilities. This methodology was based on a limited understanding of cognitive science, personality indicators and real-world application of skills. Not to mention, the technology simply wasn’t there to streamline the process. 

But thanks to advances in tech and greater research into workforce dynamics, pre-employment checks are now more reliable. 

Here’s what you should look out for when conducting pre-employment tests:

Personality and Culture Fit

The values, beliefs and behaviors of employees have a tremendous impact on the overall effectiveness of a team - and by extension, a company’s success. According to research by The Society of Human Resource Management, published in the Harvard Business Review in 2015, the consequence of placing an employee with ‘poor culture fit’ can cost an organization between 50-60% of the person’s annual salary.

Testing for a good culture fit requires state-of-the-art technology. By asking in-depth questions that look at the background, values and beliefs of the interviewee, employers can gain more insight into how they’d fit with the current team and company dynamic. 

Culture fit is especially important if you are placing candidates in multilingual positions requiring communication with people around the globe. You need to know that their attitude, values, and culture will align with the values of those they interact with on a day-to-day basis. 

Situational Judgement

It’s one thing knowing that an employee has experience in completing similar tasks or knowledge about a subject - it’s quite another being able to see their skills for yourself. As part of pre-employment checks, it’s important you can assess skills within real-world scenarios that the employee would be faced with when working for your company. Whether your business is retail, healthcare, consulting, or something else, testing the situational judgement of employees helps you make a more informed decision about hiring them. 

Cognitive Ability

Approximately 80% of the Fortune 500 companies utilize cognitive testing during the hiring process. The principal factor measured in pre-employment cognitive tests is how an individual thinks. In this process, you’re less interested in what they know and more interested in their problem solving skills, verbal reasoning, critical thinking, reading comprehension and decision-making process. By assessing these equalities, you gain deeper insight into your potential employee’s career potential and the individual value they bring to your team. 

Emotional Intelligence

As well as judgement and cognition, you can also consider assessing the emotional intelligence of a future employee. This term is commonly known as EI and measures a person’s ability to identify, evaluate and manage the personal feelings of other people and groups. This is especially important if your employee will be in a customer facing role, with the task of problem-solving during pressured or stressful emotional situations. 

Skills

Last but not least, you must be able to measure the skills of an employee. Language (both written and oral), numeracy and data analysis will be some of the core skills you wish to test for. The more niche skill sets you test for will depend on the industry you are in. For example, if your organization is online retail with a number of call centers in operation spanning multiple countries, you can assess the customer communication skills of potential employees as well as their ability to handle confidential data, manage spreadsheets and make sales. 

Deeper Knowledge: Better Results

Gone are the days when you know very little about potential candidates before hiring. Now, pre-employment checks can be designed with intricacy, accuracy, and usability. Having such thorough knowledge about a candidate can help you make better decisions about their overall fit. Doing this reduces the chances of high employee turnover, costly HR processes and disbalanced skill-sets within teams. Pipplet can help…

How Pipplet can help

Pipplet is a modern way of testing future potential employees' language & communications skills. When using Pipplet in your recruitment process, you can test for more than hard and soft skills. The cognitive, social and judgement skills of your candidates are thoroughly assessed through real-life, interactive scenarios in more than 30 languages.

Hiring more than one person? No problem. Pipplet utilizes comprehensive technology so that you can assess 1 or 100 potential employees before signing the dotted line. Get detailed, accurate, confidential reports to help you hire the highest performing individuals and watch your business go from strength to strength thanks to the caliber of employees you invest in. 

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