No employer wants to hire an incompetent employee. This is why employers or recruiting managers try to collect as much relevant information on their candidates as possible.
Traditional methods such as sorting through resumes, and conducting one-to-one interviews have become passé. They are inefficient and don’t yield the best insight about a candidate.
In fact, according to a report, up to 78% of resumes contain misleading information, while 46% contain information that is untrue,
Similarly, interviews are also poor predictors of job performance. And this is why candidate testing has become the new form of recruitment for many employers.
The Benefits of Candidate Testing
There are many other reasons why candidate testing is becoming popular amongst employers such as:
● Streamlines the recruitment process
● Increase the likelihood that new employees will be successful in their jobs
● Helps ensure alignment between the candidate selection process and desired outcomes such as higher customer satisfaction, reduced turnover, and increased revenue.
The most important advantages an employer experience by adopting a candidate testing solution include:
● Increased productivity
● Increased employee retention and lower expenses associated with turnover (e.g., training and recruiting expenditures)
● The more efficient, less time-consuming recruitment process
Now, let’s learn more about the benefits in detail to understand better.
Predict Performance
Professionally developed and well-validated candidate testing procedures help employers predict candidate productivity across a wide range of job types. Because the tests help determine the level of knowledge and skills of a candidate and if s/he has the ability to perform well at any given task.
Increase Employee Retention and Reduce Turnover Costs
Candidate testing procedures help employers retain their best employees for a long period of time by making sure that new employees have the basic competence needed for the job along with the suitable personality, or temperament, to feel comfortable with the type of task needed of them.
These factors make sure that neither the employers need to terminate their employees for poor performance or unsuccessful completion of training nor the employees will quit on their own. In both cases, employers save a significant amount of money.
Save Time
Recruiting a new candidate takes time. It could take around 45 days for an employer to fill a vacant position. The size of applicant pools have doubled and tripled over time and this makes recruiting harder than ever. Employers or recruiters have to manage applicant flow and identify the right candidates within a sea of resumes.
Candidate testing streamlines this process and saves significant time for employers. By requiring the candidates to take the tests early on, employers or recruiters set apart the resume spammers which come with minimal thought or effort.
The candidates who complete the tests are serious enough to put in the time and effort to take the tests. Furthermore, employers set minimum cutoff scores for certain tests which help them narrow down the number of applicants to select for in-person or telephonic interviews.
Candidates testing procedures help employers and recruiters limit the hours spent on time-consuming hiring activities by making it seamless to identify the right candidates with the most potential for success on the given job.
Increase Defensibility
Another reason why many employers prefer candidate testing is because it augments the equitability, objectivity, and legal defensibility of their recruitment process.
Such tests are governed by federal regulations to ensure non-discriminatory and equitable practices. And this is why some employers prefer to go for pre-employment tests to increase their legal exposure.
Reliable
Employers find candidate testing procedures a reliable and objective means of collecting job-related data on candidates. Such tests offer an element of objectivity into the recruitment process by giving tangible results that can be standardized across all candidates or applicants. Employers then use this information to make better-informed hiring decisions.
Long story short, candidate testing is a gamechanger for many employers because of the sheer amount of benefits it comes with as shared above.
So, what do you think about candidate testing? Do you have anything to add or have any questions? Please feel free to leave your comments below.
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