For many of us, Fall tends to be a busy time of year for recruiting new staff. If you’ve ever been the person responsible for hiring a new employee at your company, you’ll know that one of the biggest challenges in the screening process is trying to get as much relevant information as possible from a candidate so that you can feel confident that you’re hiring the best person for the job. Eventually you come to the point in the process where an offer of employment is extended, but for most people there is still lingering doubt about whether or not they’ve made the right decision. Interviews, resumes, phone screens and references are often poor predictors of how a candidate will actually perform on the job. A well developed, valid and reliable pre-employment test takes the guess work out of hiring by providing an employer with an objective way to gather information about how the candidate will perform in the job. Long story short, pre-employment tests help take the uncertainty out of your screening process and will let you hire with greater insight and confidence.
Hiring correctly the first time will boost employee morale, increase workplace productivity, minimize workplace complaints, decrease employee turnover and ultimately, save your organization time and money.
High employee turnover however can cost 30-400% of an employee’s salary to replace them. That is a significant amount, considering the other costs associated with the recruitment process. Some contributing factors that are costly in the recruitment and onboarding processes are:
- Hiring manager’s time
- Internal / external recruiters salary
- Employee training costs
- Job board and advertising costs
- Lost productivity if an employee isn’t immediately replaced
- Lower productivity while a new employee learns the job
- Employer branding efforts
- Employee relocation costs
Each of these factors can significantly affect your bottom line, which is why it is so important to take the time to properly screen your prospective employees, ensuring they really are the right hire. It’s easy to miss signs that an employee is not the right fit for your company when you are so busy assessing their personality, listening carefully to their responses, and questioning if they are being fully truthful or not.
On top of it all, studies show that applicants tend to exaggerate or inflate their strengths and trivialize their weaknesses, it’s a lot to look out for in one 30 minute interview.
So where do traditional interviews fall short? In the 2018 Global Recruiting Trends report by LinkedIn, 63% of 9,000 hiring managers who participated in the study said that interviews fail to assess the candidate’s soft skills (like communication, collaboration, listening, and empathy). Furthermore, 57% of respondents said that interviews fail to help them identify a candidate’s weaknesses, and 42% thought that interview bias was to blame.
The recruitment process takes time, money, patience and proper screening. A screening test is like a second pair of eyes and ears that every recruiter feels they need throughout the hiring process. It can put your mind at ease, knowing that you hired right the first time, saving your company thousands of dollars on that bad hire that just happened to slip through the cracks.
There are many different types of screening products, such as: aptitude tests, skills tests, background checks, integrity screening, physical ability tests, job knowledge tests, cognitive ability tests and personality screening.
Recruit Rite, a division of Limestone Technologies offers The Holden Applicant Reliability Measure (HARM) integrity screening test and ACE personality screening test. HARM is a 30 minute, 100 item true/false self-report measure that assesses on-the-job counterproductive behaviours. ACE, is a 30 item, 10 minute screening tool that measures the 5 key personality traits, with specific focus on the top 3 traits that are transferable across cultures. These can be used separately, but deliver the best results when used in tandem.
Hiring right the first time can provide your organization with long-lasting value, which is why augmenting your hiring processes with pre-employment assessments is the best route to take. Screening allows you to objectively get to know a candidate and make more informed hiring decisions, with the ultimate goal of reducing employee turnover rates and the potential to save your organization thousands of dollars.
Leave a Reply