Are Prehire Assessments for Everybody?

More companies are using prehire assessments than ever before to make the talent acquisition process less painful, more accurate and less subjective. But are prehire assessments for everybody? Do they do a good job of raising accuracy of hiring decisions?

According to the Wall Street Journal, eight of the top 10 U.S. private employers now administer prehire tests to job applicants for some positions.

• In 2001, 26% of large U.S. employers used prehire assessments.
• By 2013, the number had climbed to 57%.

Moreover, research and advisory firm Bersin by Deloitte estimates that the assessment industry has grown 30 to 40 percent in the past five years. I believe the reasons for this surge in using assessments for hiring are the following:

1. A shockingly low percentage of new hires succeed (46% fail within 18 months).
2. Only 19-25% of hires become top performers.
3. Using usual interview processes, hiring success rates are no better than flipping a coin.
4. The cost of mis-hires can run three times an annual salaries or more.

The use of prehiring assessments is to provide the talent acquisition team with as much relevant, job-related information about the candidate as possible. A well-designed assessment – one that targets the skills and personality traits relevant to the position the candidate is applying for – will do just that.

Using a prehire assessment is no different than using a GPS for navigation: it acts like a guide to give you information in order to make the right decisions. However, many hiring managers try to short cut the assessment process by relying on their own good judgment and traditional interview processes.

They often make the mistake of focusing strictly on past work experience in the interview. But past experience will not give a true sense of the potential employee. What’s more useful is assessment of a candidate’s strengths and talent. Companies need to focus on talent assessment, rather than simply looking at past experience.

This is a common but costly error. If you interview candidates solely on technical skills, you ignore a critical factor in performance: a candidate’s attitude and social skills in working with others. And the only way you can gather that sort of information is through reliably validated assessment tools.

You can avoid a lot of wasted time and energy as well as the cost of mishires by using the right assessments for talent acquisition. It’s a primary reasons clients work with us here at Vondrell Leadership.

Part of successfully using prehire tools, however, is educating candidates that assessments will help them be matched to a job that they will be more successful in. A prehire assessment is a good driving force for making more accurate hiring decisions, provided you have a well-designed assessment that evaluates job-critical skills, including those pesky “soft skills.”

Besides evaluating a candidate, companies need to thoroughly examine the job, it’s requirements, and objectives. Nothing is more important for facilitating a good match with a candidate than knowing the key accountabilities of the job.

In the meantime, let me know if I can help you and your company improve your hiring success rates. I can be reached here or on LinkedIn.