Hiring the best individuals entails much more than simply evaluating applicants’ skill sets. You must ensure that the candidates are compatible with your company’s culture and promote your brand. Businesses use employment assessments to ensure that their new or potential recruits are the correct fit for the job.
Employment screening encompasses everything from in-depth background investigations to employee performance evaluation. Pre-employment testing can assist you in accomplishing this. It is how most employers conduct employee evaluations. This includes ensuring a background check for employment, screening them for drugs, and assessing their behavior, skills, and attitudes.
What is pre-employment screening?
Pre-employment screening is standardised evaluations that are used to examine candidates’ abilities, actions, and personalities. Different forms of employee assessments can be used to learn more about various elements of prospective employees, as we’ll discuss in more detail in a later section.
The findings of pre-employment assessments are used to determine whether a candidate fits the job requirements and possesses the necessary abilities to succeed in the role. In addition, these tests are used to cut down the candidate pool and identify who will advance to the next step of the employment process. Therefore, pre-employment testing must be fast and reliable to make confident hiring judgments.
What are the types of pre-employment screenings?
- Personality and aptitude tests
These tests assist you in determining your employees’ personality qualities and their areas of competence. Both these personality and aptitude tests measure an employee’s ability to perform in a particular setting. It also aids in determining whether the candidate’s skill set makes them capable of handling the job requirements.
- Job knowledge and cognitive abilities tests
Cognitive abilities tests enable you to identify individuals capable of doing the jobs by administering tests that cover job knowledge. Furthermore, you can assess a candidate’s cognitive talents to see if they have solid critical thinking skills, a detail-oriented approach, and the capacity to operate in a team, among other things.
- Cultural Assessments
Hiring for cultural fit is a minimal recruitment technique that will result in an office full of carbon clones. In the end, this might lead to toxic workplace culture. You should, however, hire people who share your fundamental views and believe in your mission statement. A cultural fit evaluation allows you to identify whether a candidate holds the same attitudes and values necessary to be a productive member of your team and office.
- Emotional Intelligence Tests
An emotional intelligence test evaluates a candidate’s ability to interpret their own and others’ emotions. This is a fundamental ability for working in an office and as part of a team, but it is imperative in particular roles, such as sales or customer success.
- Soft Skill Tests
In today’s work market, soft skills are increasingly valuable. Communication, social intelligence, and the ability to collaborate well with others are highly sought after soft skills required in practically every profession, regardless of industry. This type of pre-employment test is beneficial because it’s challenging to be impartial while analysing and discussing subjective attributes between candidates.
Other types of pre-employment screening include public record screening, criminal background screening, lie detector exams, etc.
Why are pre-employment screenings important?
Let’s take a look at how pre-employment screening might help you.
- Verification of the candidate’s personal and professional information
If you don’t run background checks on prospects, you risk hiring someone who is either unqualified or untrustworthy. Both of these things might make it difficult for day-to-day operations to run smoothly. In addition, candidates tend to provide inaccurate personal and professional information to land a job offer. This is an indication of dishonesty and not a quality you want in your staff. Furthermore, it may result in legal ramifications.
- Maintaining a secure working environment.
Pre-employment screening reduces your company’s liability and protects other employees’ privacy. Because you’ll be dealing with external stakeholders, vendors, and sensitive information daily, conducting a background check on possible workers is critical.
- To make your hiring process more efficient and effective.
The hiring process itself can be stressful at times. Skipping background checks on potential employees can make the process much more difficult. Pre-employment screening is necessary if you want to streamline your hiring process and choose dependable and competent applicants.
Conclusion
To make your hiring decision process more manageable and effective, employ our gamified assessments and take your business to new heights. Discover Assessments empower you to hire the right talent. We deliver transformative results for our clients and their staff through research-based tests and in-depth analytics. Moreover, you can use the information to create training programmes, implement learning and development initiatives, and much more.
Related Article : Five Ways Employee Assessments Can Improve Your Business
Pre-Employment Screening – FAQs
Yes, there are some pre-employment screening tests that have a cut-off for a pass/fail result.
Pre-employment tests include aptitude tests, integrity & ethics test, emotional intelligence tests.
No, it only means that one level of the hiring process has been completed. Such screening is followed by an interview or a series of interviews.
The main purpose of pre-employment screening is to filter out a large number of candidates and identify the best candidates for interviewing.
Yes, they are legal as long as they do not discriminate based on race, religion, gender, language etc.
