Pre-employment tests can be an excellent way to differentiate between candidates when you implement them the right way in the recruitment process. Uncover more about your applicants, including personality styles, emotional intelligence, and cognitive abilities. However, there are five common mistakes that recruiters make when it comes to pre-employment tests. Find out what they are and how you can avoid making them in the future.

What Are Pre-Employment Tests?

If you need a predetermined, objective way of gaining more data on the abilities of your candidates during the recruitment process, pre-employment tests are the way to do it. They are a way to gain insight into the traits and skills of your potential employees.

With hundreds of people applying to work in your organization, it can quickly become overwhelming trying to differentiate between candidates. Large applicant pools can quickly be whittled down by using pre-employment tests. Simply let qualified applicants complete the assessment and then choose the candidates who performed the best on skills relevant to the available position. Then you can create your shortlist to interview from these applicants.

Pre-employment tests come in various forms, depending on the role in question. Some will determine the personality of the candidate, which is ideal when you are recruiting for team or culture fit. If you need someone good-natured and outgoing for a sales position, a personality test can assist you in finding them. Cognitive aptitude tests help you to discover the mental abilities of respondents. You can also provide skills tests to see how good your candidates are at specific skills that the successful person will use in their new position. Finally, there are emotional intelligence tests. These focus on how well the person manages their own emotions and the emotions of those around them. Emotional intelligence is particularly important for managers to have, as they need to understand what motivates people in order to lead effectively.

Choose a test based on what is most important for the position, and these tests can have high validity and help you to find out who might be a good fit for the position.

5 Common Mistake Employers Make in Their Pre-Employment Tests

Assuming there is No Risk of Failure

Most often, pre-employment tests are better at predicting failure than they are at predicting success. That’s because they can weed out those applicants who simply don’t have the skills or nature required for the job. However, it is much more difficult to determine from a test how motivated someone will be to be successful in the role.

Even if you only hire those with scores over, say, 79%, you will still find that some will be successful in the role, and some may fail. However, studies show that of the candidates who score 78% or less, 75% would be failures. So, these pre-employment tests are better at helping you avoid mistakes rather than predicting your success.

Making a Decision Too Early

One of the worst things you can do in the hiring process is to make your decision too early. Often, managers get back the results from the pre-employment tests and already decide that they are going to hire the person that performed the best. However, that’s not quite how these tests are designed to work. Any of the top scorers may have the right skills for the position, but then you need to interview for team fit, culture fit, motivation, and other factors. If you decide too early that you know who you will hire, you’re likely to completely skew the results of your interview process.

Hiring Based on One Trait

Often, employers have a trait in mind that they are seeking in their new staff member. This characteristic may be important to you, but remember that each candidate will come with a unique mix of skills and experience. Focusing on one trait above all else may cause you to hire someone who is outstanding in one area but lacking in the rest. You are better off hiring an all-round performer. By using pre-employment tests to determine a number of different characteristics, you can instead find the people who performed fairly well at everything, rather than just the best on one thing.

Selecting Irrelevant Tests

This misstep is a crucial one that could cost you everything. Pre-employment tests must be highly relevant to the available position, or they have no use at all. Even excellent pre-employment tests based on years of research can be useless if used to hire for the wrong position. For example, don’t give construction workers a typing test or ask secretaries to perform manual labor during pre-employment tests. There may be legal issues as well, if you test people on abilities irrelevant to the role.

Not Considering Candidate Experience

Many of us are guilty of this mistake during the hiring process – not thinking about the candidate’s experience. What is your recruitment process like for the applicants? Some pre-employment tests can be tedious, time-consuming, and a huge burden to candidates. If the tests are too long, the candidate may feel that you don’t value their time. You could lose potentially fantastic candidates by making the recruitment process too difficult and lengthy. If your first communication with an applicant is to ask them to undertake a 4-hour test, this is a huge investment for someone who likely won’t get the position. Instead, keep your pre-employment tests short.

Another way that you can improve the candidate experience is through excellent communication. Let the respondents know all the log in details for the test and maybe even create a guide for them, so they know how to complete each step. This can help greatly by giving them a positive impression of your hiring process.

If you can be mindful to avoid these five mistakes in pre-employment tests, you will likely find that you retain better candidates. By the time you get to interviewing, these tests should have helped you discover some incredible potential talent for your organization.