Pre-employment testing can be the difference between a quality hire and a bad one, and poor hiring decisions could wreck any organization. With resume screening becoming less effective as a standalone recruitment method, hiring managers must have a solid hiring strategy to fall back on.
Pre-employment testing fits this bill, evaluating candidates with precise accuracy to ensure they’re right for your company. In this article, we’ll explore what pre-employment testing is, the types of pre-employment tests, and how to make them work for you. Let’s dive right in!
What is pre-employment testing?
Pre-employment testing involves assessing candidates’ job proficiency and organizational fit before extending an offer to them. In this hiring method, you test candidates on job-relevant technical skills, soft skills, and company culture, then hire those with the best performance.
Pre-employment assessments give you a preview of a candidate’s ability to do the job, helping you make objective, data-driven choices. This is particularly necessary because other traditional recruitment methods, such as resume screening or interviews, are subject to individual preferences.
As a result, subconscious bias could easily interfere with hiring decisions, leading to costly mistakes. In fact, bias is such a rampant problem that up to 48% of HR managers admit it affects their candidate choice, according to a 2023 Zippia study.
Types of pre-employment tests
Pre-employment tests differ by their use case and can work either individually or combined with other types, depending on the job’s requirements. Here are five basic pre-employment tests to note.
1. Skill tests
Skill tests are assessments that evaluate candidates’ proficiency in skills necessary to do a job. These could be either technical or soft skills, but they must be directly relevant and tailored to the role you’re hiring for. For example, you can administer a skills test to determine the expertise of a content marketer in SEO and funnel optimization or the communication skills of a customer representative.
With skill tests, your hiring decisions are based on who can actually do the job rather than qualifications on paper. Depending on the recruitment platform used, skill tests come in various formats, including multiple-choice, video, spreadsheets, or presentations. You could also utilize job simulations to get a realistic view of how candidates approach tasks and see their processes.
2. Culture fit tests
A capable candidate who doesn’t work well with other employees can still hinder productivity and prevent your team from achieving its goals. Thus, in addition to testing their skill level, you also want to check for organizational fit, and this is where culture fit tests come in.
A typical culture fit test can help you gauge whether candidates thrive in a collaborative, feedback-driven environment or prefer working independently. With these tests, you assess their values and ethics to see whether they align with your organization’s. This tells you how seamlessly they’ll adjust to your work culture if hired and whether they’ll make a good addition to the team.
3. Behavioral tests
Behavioral tests check a candidate’s behavioral tendencies and personality traits. Although behavior isn’t a direct requirement for most job roles, it could easily influence their relationships within the team and with customers.
Say you present a candidate with a high-pressure scenario or a series of rejections. Behavioral tests can reveal their calmness under stress, as well as their persistence and resilience in closing a deal after several rejections or setbacks.
Ultimately, these tests let you vet and screen out negative character traits that could severely impact your work environment and team morale. They also provide some insight into your candidate’s personality, which could guide you in leading and supporting them if brought onto your team.
4. Emotional intelligence (EI) tests
Beyond their behavior and personality, a candidate’s emotional intelligence determines how well they react to issues and relate with people. EI tests measure this by evaluating candidates’ self and situational awareness, both factors that affect how they’ll adapt to your team. For example, you could determine how candidates react, manage frustration, and offer support when a colleague misses a deadline, causing delays in a group project.
EI tests usually present the candidate with hypothetical tricky situations that require intelligence to handle effectively. From their responses, you can accurately predict how their reaction could impact interpersonal relationships and work culture, improving your quality-of-hire.
5. Cognitive ability tests
Cognitive ability tests check for analytical reasoning and intelligence. They include logical, numerical, or verbal reasoning tests, all with the aim of assessing the candidate’s intellectual and problem-solving abilities.
For example, if you’re hiring for a data analyst role, these tests could help you discover candidates who analyze sales data trends quickly, identify issues, and proffer actionable solutions.
Cognitive ability tests give you insight into how quickly the candidate observes, adapts, and applies information to a challenge. In dynamic environments or roles that require quick decision-making and little error, this comes in handy, as it predicts their likely performance in that role.
Why hire with pre-employment tests?
Hiring with pre-employment tests reduces the chances of bad hires, helps you select talents that can help you achieve your goals, and ensures a more effective hiring process overall. Below, we’ll see four reasons why hiring with pre-employment tests can benefit your firm.
1. Accurate, objective candidate evaluation
With traditional hiring methods, there’s usually more emphasis on qualifications or background than actual job ability. However, as buttressed by a 2022 McKinsey report, hiring for skills is five times more predictive of job performance than hiring for education and over twice more than hiring for experience.
Pre-employment testing focuses on your pre-defined skill needs and evaluates candidates against these requirements to ensure you hire correctly. Also, these tests are standardized and automatically graded, improving accuracy and reliability.
2. Saves time and resources
Not only are resume screening and interviews less effective, but they’re also time-consuming. This is especially evident in companies with several applicants, where reviewing hundreds of resumes drains resources and creates bottlenecks in the hiring process. Pre-employment testing offers a solution by screening out unqualified candidates, leaving you to focus on a more streamlined, skilled talent pipeline.
3. Eliminates hiring bias
Traditional recruitment methods are unreliable when used alone as they often introduce bias into your decision process. A 2024 The Muse report proves this, stating that 42% of women encountered gender-biased or inappropriate questions during a job interview.
In both resume screening and interviews, hiring managers may lean towards subtle preferences in candidates, and these don’t necessarily translate to good hires. Pre-employment tests remove these biases and provide fair, equal grounds for all candidates. Here, candidates get hired strictly based on job performance and not subjective qualifications, increasing chances of job success.
4. Increased employee retention
Using pre-employment tests increases your chances of hiring a candidate with both job and organizational fit. When candidates feel at home in a company and have the capacity to succeed in a job role, they’re more willing to remain with the company and put in their best effort. On the other hand, employees who are poorly suited to their roles are less inclined to continue, leading to turnover.
How to choose the right pre-employment test
Since there are several pre-employment assessments available, you must know how to choose the right one to achieve your hiring goals. Here, we’ll discuss four things to note when choosing pre-employment tests.
1. Define your job requirements and testing goals
First, clearly define your hiring needs and what skills your ideal candidate should have to perform well. From core technical skills to interpersonal skills, identify what you’re looking for and what your talent screening should achieve. This points you in the right direction, giving you an idea of what tests align with your goals.
2. Choose customizable tests
Next, choose an assessment that evaluates your requirements, ensuring that your platform and tests are customizable. Customizing your tests lets you tweak them to reflect your exact needs, making the assessment process more relevant to the job. Rather than using strict baselines, refine and continuously iterate your tests as your organization changes and grows.
Thankfully, Vervoe, our hiring and recruitment software, is ideal for meeting this need. Our assessment library offers over 300 ready-made templates and 300,000 questions, providing a variety that allows you to evaluate according to your specific criteria. Using our software gives you the freedom to either build your assessment from scratch or use a template that aligns with your needs.
Additionally, Vervoe’s Active Learning AI learns what kind of employees you prefer from existing data and automatically updates your tests with this information. This keeps your assessments current and reflective of your organization’s present needs, helping you make better hires.
3. Prioritize candidate experience
Lengthy or unnecessarily complex assessments put candidates off and reduce their interest in the job. It also reduces your company’s public image and communicates little respect for candidates’ time or value.
To maintain enthusiasm for the role, your assessments should be thorough but engaging and interactive. Also, combine various test formats to avoid monotony and keep their interest piqued throughout the test’s duration.
4. Check for fairness and reliability
One of the purposes of pre-employment assessments is fair, accurate testing, so your tests must meet these demands. Choose a trusted recruitment platform, ensure your hiring criteria are industry-standard, and test all candidates equally. Additionally, review these requirements regularly and iterate your system to reflect your current hiring situation.
Tips for effective pre-employment testing
After choosing your pre-employment tests and platform, how do you integrate it into your process for the best results? Check out the following five foolproof tips for effective pre-employment testing:
1. Combine tests if needed
It’s highly unlikely that one kind of pre-employment test can provide a comprehensive candidate evaluation for a job. Most roles require a mix of hard and soft skills, which means that you should structure your assessments as a combination of tests.
For example, you can pair skills tests, culture fit, and emotional intelligence tests when hiring for a leadership position. This approach is more balanced and provides a more holistic view compared to single-test assessments.
2. Test early in the hiring process
Although you can use pre-employment tests at various hiring funnel stages, implementing them in the early stages is key to efficient hiring. Before offering interview invitations or screening resumes in detail, use pre-employment tests to screen out candidates who don’t meet your requirements and don’t show potential.
Reducing your candidate pool early streamlines your focus to the top talents, keeping your process fast with minimal cost. Focused assessments also provide a healthy knowledge of candidates’ strengths and weak points, helping you to channel their development properly.
3. Tailor tests to your specific hiring needs
The more aligned your pre-employment assessments are with your hiring needs, the better your quality-of-hire. Rather than using generic or vague tests, customize tests to evaluate your exact needs only, keeping them as concise and direct as possible. This lets you hone in on the key attributes you need for success, minimize distractions, and achieve your hiring goals faster.
4. Regularly review test data and results
Work environments are fast-paced and evolve frequently, so your tests should reflect these changes. Consistently compare your hiring needs to testing criteria to confirm that your assessments can easily identify the right candidate for you.
Also, review candidates’ responses for insight into their abilities and the kind of applicants your organization attracts. With these responses as a guide, you can refine your system to improve your assessment’s quality and selection process.
5. Communicate the purpose to candidates
According to a 2017 CareerBuilder study, 81% of job seekers appreciate when employers continuously communicate status updates, as it greatly improves their overall experience. Candidates appreciate companies that explain every stage of their hiring process to them, their timelines, and what to expect, leading to improved candidate experience.
Moreover, when candidates understand why they’re taking the pre-employment tests and what skills you’re evaluating, they can prepare ahead of time and bring their A-game.
Conduct reliable pre-employment tests with Vervoe
Pre-employment assessments are easily among the most effective hiring methods, as they help you achieve a quick, cost-efficient, and dependable hiring process. But, for these tests to give you the best hires, you must use reliable, trustworthy software that can be integrated easily.
Vervoe’s results are unmatched, being among the top-rated recruitment and pre-employment testing software available. Whether you’re testing for skill level, culture fit, cognitive ability, or emotional intelligence, Vervoe’s assessment library has something for you. Rich with customizable, AI-graded assessments, job simulations, branding, and anti-cheating features, our software is fully equipped to handle your hiring needs.
Ready to let Vervoe elevate your hiring process? Register for a free demo and start hiring the right way today.
