How Do Pre-Hire Assessments Work?

There is so much to know about a potential hire that you simply can’t get from a cover letter, a resume, or even an interview. Unfortunately, bad hires can not only cause headaches for your talent acquisition team but also cost your company a ton of money. 

If you want to ensure that your next hire is the perfect choice, you should strongly consider using pre-hire assessments. They give a much more comprehensive picture of your candidates so you can make an informed decision with far better odds of success. 

But what exactly are pre-hire assessments, and how do they work?

What Happens in a Pre-Hire Assessment?

Pre-hire assessments are a method of testing for a variety of skills and traits in a potential hire. They can screen for cognitive ability, specific knowledge, problem-solving skills, leadership qualities, honesty and empathy, and a number of other factors that can help inform your hiring decision. 

Another benefit of pre-hire assessments is that they can help remove bias from the hiring process so that you can compare candidates fairly. 

It can be easy for anyone to inaccurately assess a potential hire’s qualities due to the array of preconceptions people can unconsciously carry. Pre-hire tests can help to combat unconscious bias, so the hiring process is as fair and successful as possible.

What Information Do Pre-Hire Assessments Provide?

There are a variety of employee assessments you can ask potential hires to take in order to gain better insight into their skills, knowledge, personality, and more. The following are some of the most common types of pre-hire tests.

Knowledge of the Job

Certain positions require a level of knowledge that isn’t necessarily easy to gauge from a resume and an interview. If you really want to ensure that a candidate knows what they need to know, you can employ a job knowledge test. 

Depending on your industry, these types of employee assessments can be extremely important. What a candidate learned at their former place of employment may be extremely different from what they need to know at your organization, in spite of them holding a similar title.

Specific Skills

When specific skills are crucial to a position, you want to ensure that your talent acquisition team has the ability to fully assess whether a candidate actually has these skills or is simply saying they do. There’s no simpler way to investigate this than by employing a skills assessment at some point during the hiring process.

Cognitive Ability

You can employ a cognitive ability test to get a better idea of general aptitude during the talent acquisition process. These tests will work to quantify a candidate’s capacity for logic and reasoning.

Emotional Intelligence

As important as it is to determine how good a candidate might be at their job, it’s also critical to understand their capacity for teamwork and empathizing with coworkers, clients, and customers. 

Compassion, adaptability, and conflict resolution are fantastic skills for any employee, and an emotional intelligence test can help you determine whether a potential hire possesses them.

Personality Traits

It can clearly take a while to really get to know someone. This is one of the reasons why simple interviews are flawed. 

If you want to get the best possible assessment of a candidate’s personality, you should pair your interviews with a personality test. These tests are not just useful for weeding out negative personality traits — they can also help you determine the perfect hire in terms of fit with your team and your company culture.

Personality tests can help to identify behavioral competencies and qualities such as cooperativeness or independence, introversion or extroversion, and leadership or a tendency to follow. 

Integrity or Honesty

Some companies like to employ an integrity test to assess the sort of risk a potential candidate might pose to their company. 

These tests ask a variety of ethical questions in order to get an idea of how reliable the candidate might be.

Pre-Hire Assessments by McQuaig Institute

If you want to start making the right hires and stop wasting money on ineffective talent acquisition, you should consider using pre-hire assessments. And if you’re going to use pre-hire assessments, you should choose the ones that are proven to work, like the assessments from McQuaig Institute. 

We offer a variety of personality assessments that can help give you a clearer picture of the candidate you’re considering. We can also give you some tips on how to best employ your pre-hire assessments, so they’re as effective as possible. If you’re interested in improving your hiring process, request a demo from McQuaig Institute today.