Having the right employees on your team is one of the best assets your business can have. After all, it’s the employees who are the lifeblood of the organization. How businesses fare largely depends on how good your employees are as invaluable instruments to success.
That is why it’s a must to get the hiring process correctly from the start. With the hiring process beginning with pre-employment assessment, it’s crucial to have a strong start here to ensure that you’ve screened the right employees for the team.
However, hiring and pre-employment assessment are often easier said than done. Let’s now look at four best practices businesses can apply for pre-employment assessment and skills testing:
1. Be Very Specific With Your Job Descriptions
If you merely come up with vague job descriptions, the chance of making the right assessment as to hires that fit the description is slim. Give yourself a strong start by being as specific as you can with the job descriptions you’re writing. This can help simplify the process of sorting through your potential candidates.
To take the guesswork out of writing job descriptions, the following can be applied by your HR team:
- Avoid using abbreviations whenever you can to avoid any confusion.
- Use bullet points to make the lines easier to comprehend.
- Always start with a short but engaging overview of the job.
- Create a sense of urgency for the job.
- Get as innovative as you can.
2. Offer Competitive Salaries
Your pre-employment strategies will be even more effective when you have competitive salaries to match. Remember that when you send out hiring notices, you’re putting yourself in a candidate’s market. This means job applicants are possibly getting other job offers, so they can be choosy if they want to. Without a competitive salary offer, you could be slashing down your potential hires immediately, leaving you with fewer candidates.
The key to offering competitive salaries is to base your offer on the market, not your budget. This means using factors like geography or location and the type of industry.
3. Get To Know The Different Types Of Pre-Employment Tests
Did you know that there are different types of pre-employment tests you can use? Find out what these are, so you can adequately apply the best match for your business.
To start with, some of the different types of pre-employment tests used by employers are:
- Personality Questionnaires. While it’s the skills and the content of the resume that land an employee their job, personality matters, too. Why would you limit yourself to difficult employees when you can have people with good character?
This is what a personality questionnaire can do for your HR team. It can help you assess the personality traits of certain applicants, so you’ll have an overall picture of their character.
- Job Knowledge Tests. You can opt to give these out if you want to gauge a prospective employee’s degree of knowledge on the job at hand.
- Cognitive Ability Assessments. You can estimate an employee’s ability to use their mental processes and reasoning when you assess their cognitive skills through numerical, logical, and verbal reasoning.
- Culture Fit Assessments. Unfortunately, cultural appreciation seems to still be lacking in some people, so they tend to disrespect others’ beliefs, customs, and ways of life.
This is a must, especially for those who’ll be working with a global team. This gives you a chance to see if an applicant’s values are in sync with what the organization lives by.
- Hard Skills Assessment. This depends on whether or not the position applied for has a specific set of hard skills to be learned to perform the job well. These hard skills include computer programming, typing skills, and knowledge and proficiency in a specific foreign language.
4. Be Very Keen About Red Flags
While you’re still in the pre-employment assessment phase, be very keen about any red flags you’ll notice. Don’t brush these aside and take note of them on the applicant’s file.
Keeping track of those red flags will come in handy when narrowing down your options. If two applicants seem to be equal in merits and you can only hire one, choose the one without any caution.
Conclusion
There’s no doubt that bad hiring can cost your business in the long run. As a result, you’ll content yourself with ineffective employees when you could have hired the best and the brightest. Had you been more stringent with your pre-employment assessment and hiring process, you would have had competent and efficient employees to keep your business running. With these best practices, it is hoped that you’re saved from the trouble of suffering through having bad hires.
