Pre-employment Assessments

Written by Shawn Bakker

In spite of their best efforts, many organizations struggle with consistently finding and hiring successful employees. Often they do not know if the person hired will work out until they have been on the job for a while. To make better selection decisions organizations use a variety of methods, including application forms, interviews, reference checks, and increasingly, psychometric assessments.

Psychometric assessments help people understand and predict behavior. They are scientifically designed to provide a standardized measure of candidates’ abilities, competencies, and personality traits. Employees vary widely in their productivity, and psychometric assessments can predict these differences. By identifying the candidates that have the characteristics necessary to be successful, organizations can increase performance, while decreasing training costs and employee turnover. While there are many different assessments, they can be classified into two broad types.

Ability – Measures of “can do”

Ability assessments tell you what an individual can do. They measure a person’s level of knowledge and their capability to acquire further knowledge and skills. These tools tell you a candidate’s capabilities and learning potential. Examples of assessments that fall in this area include measures of intelligence, verbal ability, and mechanical aptitude. Ability assessments are among the best predictors of job performance.

Personality – Measures of “will do”

Personality assessments identify candidates’ typical behaviour and show what candidates will likely do on a daily basis. Since they are designed to measure a person’s tendency to behave in certain ways, personality measures can tell you if an individual is easy to manage, works hard, offers innovation solutions, and works well with others.

Benefits of using assessments

Cost Savings

Employment assessments can be a cost effective way to pare down the applicant pool. They make the decision process more efficient because less time is spent with individuals whose characteristics, skills, and abilities do not match what is needed. Choosing the wrong candidates is also very costly in terms of training, errors made by a poor performer, and turnover. Investing in pre-employment assessments quickly pays for itself by reducing the number of poor hiring decisions. For simple jobs, the return on investment for identifying good employees is generally 10 – 20% of their salary each year. For complex positions like management, the return on investment increases to 80-120% of their salary each year.

Depth of Information

Psychometric assessments provide information about an individual that is not easily obtained using other methods, such as interviews. They also provide a quick way to assess characteristics that cannot be developed through training but are acquired over long periods of time.

Consistency

Using standardized assessments in employment decision-making ensures that candidates are treated objectively by gathering the same information for each one. The standardization prevents subjective biases from influencing hiring decisions.

Where to Begin?

Knowing what you are looking for is the most important step in using psychometric assessments for employee selection. Before you look for an assessment tool, determine the knowledge, skills, and traits that are related to job success. For example, if you are hiring an accountant you might need someone who pays close attention to details, and has good math skills. If you are hiring a salesperson you might want someone who is outgoing, enjoys helping people, and has a high level of stress tolerance. When you know what it takes for a person to be successful on the job you can then search for tests which measure those traits and abilities.

The use of well constructed assessments can provide organizations with additional information to help match people to job demands, improve organization fit, and address counter productive behaviors. This results in lower turnover, better job performance, lower training costs, and a more satisfied workforce. If you would like to learn more about how pre-employment assessments can help your organization, please click here or contact us at 1-800-661-5158 or info@psychometrics.com.