Pre-employment testing is the step that helps collect objective candidate data at the beginning of the hiring process. An employer must use pre-employment tests to find out the strength and weak points of job applicants before conducting an interview. It is a repeatable and scalable testing program that helps an organization and the HR team in the hiring process.
More than 71% of companies use pre-hiring assessments to save a lot of time, money, and headache. Before you take any step as an employer, let’s find out more about pre-employment tests.
Different Types of Pre-employment Tests
With a huge number of eligible candidates and fewer job roles, the market has become quite competitive, so hiring has become more complex. There are various kinds of pre-employment tests utilized by various companies across industries. Learn about a few major types of tests.
1. Personality Tests
This is the most famous type of test that was first introduced back in the time of World War I to measure neurological stress in soldiers. Eventually, these tests started to take place in the case of civilians as well and nowadays wide use can be seen everywhere starting from the therapist’s office to a team-building session.
Personality tests aim to focus on a set of core behavioral factors that help to determine overall personality type. Usually, these tests include,
• DiSC
• Hogan Personality Inventory
• Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)
• The Predictive Index Behavioral Assessment™
2. Aptitude Tests
Aptitude tests help to assess various facets of intelligence among the candidates depending on the needs of the job role. The tests mainly include interpreting data, deductive reasoning, and making decisions based on work-like scenarios. Based on problems, patterns, figures, and scenarios the common areas lie on,
• Diagrammatic reasoning
• Logical reasoning
• Numerical reasoning
• Verbal reasoning
• Situational judgment
3. Integrity Tests
Just like intelligence, an employee’s ethical and moral values also play a vital role in the growth of an organization. Integrity Tests aim to check their moral compass to measure honesty and trustworthiness for their job. Though its usage can be noticed in various industries, integrity tests mainly take place for the job roles like Data security analysts, Financial advisers, Healthcare workers, Security guards, Teachers, Policemen, and many others.
4. Cognitive Ability Tests
Cognitive ability implies a person’s capacity to acquire, process, and apply new information. These tests usually include critical reasoning, spontaneous problem-solving, logic puzzles, shape recognition, etc many other aspects that require both, speed and accuracy. Cognitive ability is a significantly powerful data point in the hiring process that helps to find the right person for the right job, regardless of educational specialization.
5. Skills Test
After behavioral and cognitive assessments, it is time to find out the areas of a candidate that are relatively innate. To truly assess an employee’s skills, it requires looking into both the soft skills as well as the hard skills.
• Hard Skills – These skills are referred to technical competencies that are required for a higher job role such as Marketing Specialist, Campaign Manager, Client Relationship manager, etc.
• Soft Skills – Regardless of the department or domain, every candidate is comprised of many soft skills that can prove useful in the workplace such as Attention to detail, Collaboration, Decision-making, Empathy, Leadership, etc to name some.
Other than that, there are also Physical Ability Tests that are widely used for job roles that require heavy manual labor or dexterity such as firefighter, construction worker, military, and so on. These Pre-employment Tests help to find the right employee for the required job role with relevance and within time.
