Using pre-employment assessments can help reduce the risk of hiring candidates who will not be successful in a role or are not a good fit for your company culture. By lowering staff turnover, your business will save time and money. Adding these tests to the hiring process provides more objective data for your HR team to make smarter hiring decisions. There are many different types of employment assessment tests and screenings that you can use.

Aptitude Tests

Often called ‘IQ tests,’ aptitude tests measure your ability to think logically and quickly in new situations. The questions vary but could include the following:

• Identifying the missing number, shape, or image at the end of a series of pictures.
• Asking you to read and interpret written scenarios.
• Using your logic to find patterns in diagrams.

These exams are excellent for positions that require workers to evaluate individual circumstances or for companies that demand a thorough awareness of corporate policies from their personnel. They also help to assess how well a candidate will follow instructions or work on tasks with limited information.

Emotional Intelligence Tests 

Different types of pre employment tests give insight into a candidate’s personality traits, including emotional intelligence (EI). EI tests usually focus on empathy, adaptability, and teamwork. They may help determine whether a candidate will contribute to a pleasant work environment and fit well with your company’s culture.

Skills Tests

Skills tests assess candidates’ ability to perform specific tasks. For instance, passing a typing test that measures accuracy and speed can be a requirement. These assessments may include case study presentations, technical coding, or situational judgment tests. These tests help employers understand how a candidate would perform in unexpected work scenarios that cannot be assessed in the interview. These assessments can assist companies in selecting the best candidates from a vast pool of applications to fill open positions. However, they can make candidates uncomfortable since they are often asked questions inappropriate in the workplace. Some of these tests can also be timed, which can be stressful for some job seekers.

Employers should use multiple test types to ensure their assessment tools are fair and accurate. They should consider a mix of soft and hard skills tests and personality and cognitive ability tests. It allows them to gather rich data and make a more informed hiring decision. Candidates should carefully read the instructions before beginning these pre-employment tests and complete the exams in a calm setting, free of interruptions. They should also get a good night’s sleep before taking the test to focus and be as prepared as possible. If they are nervous, they can remind themselves that the assessment will help the company hire the best candidates. On the other hand, many businesses opt partnett with a recruiting agency that specialize in a specific industry and can effectively vet and hire top talent. Recruiting firms are home to a network of industry experts from CEOs and Directors, to entry level specialists. Specialized agencies like sales, IT, healthcare, or marketing recruiters will be able to provide the highest caliber of talent in a shorter timespan than in-house recruiting.

Personality Tests

Personality tests such as empathy and self-awareness gauge an applicant’s interpersonal and intrapersonal tendencies. These assessments can help employers determine how well a candidate fits the company’s business ethos, rules, and culture. In addition, these tests can reveal how well a candidate gets along with coworkers. The DISC assessment, for example, helps candidates understand how their personality traits play into how they interact with colleagues. It helps to reduce the risk of miscommunication and conflict. The assessment also allows them to see how their personality affects how they take criticism from their coworkers, which could help prevent misunderstandings.

While many personality assessments are self-report, some are administered by a trained professional. These tests are often called clinical personality inventory or psychometric questionnaires.  Properly designed personality tests are meant to pinpoint permanent personality “traits” (for example, level of extroversion) and competencies rather than temporary moods or states. The MBTI, for example, includes questions that categorize test-takers into four key groupings: extraversion vs. introversion, judging vs. perceiving, intuition vs. sensing, and thinking vs. feeling. Other personality assessments, like the Caliper Profile, include 93 questions to place candidates into one of 16 different personality type categories.

Health Tests

Instead of relying on resumes and interviews, pre-employment tests provide businesses with a more comprehensive image of prospects. When well-designed, these tests offer concrete results that can be standardized and help recruiters create defensible hiring decisions. When applied appropriately, they can decrease hiring costs and time while boosting applicant satisfaction. For example, physical ability tests reveal whether someone can perform the duties of a role. These assessments can help companies avoid hiring workers who are ill-equipped for their roles or could injure themselves or their coworkers. Similarly, drug tests (normally alcohol urine tests) and background checks are frequently carried out as part of the employment process to ensure that workers don’t represent a safety risk or disobey corporate rules.

Psychological employment health screenings are also standard, including personality or aptitude tests. Therapists or psychologists may conduct More in-depth psychological testing, including measures of emotional distress and a person’s history of mental health problems such as depression or anxiety. Some companies use graphology, which analyses an applicant’s handwriting to determine a person’s traits. However, this type of test has yet to be proven effective in predicting job performance. Typically, these tests are conducted at the start of the recruitment process, helping recruiters narrow the pool and make high-quality shortlists. Some of these are even requirements for getting an interview, which cuts down on the number of people who need to be vetted and saves everyone’s time and energy.