How Pre-employment Assessments Can Help You Hire Great People

When hiring employees, everything rests on the hiring manager and the company’s hiring process to make sure that not only the right candidate is given the position but also the right person for the job.

After all, resumes can look very deceiving, and sometimes in cases that you may not initially expect.

While others can look very expertly written despite not having enough experience to vouch for their capability to handle the job well, it is becoming increasingly common for those with a good number of years and experience to fool managers even though the candidates themselves are not a good fit both for the position and the company culture.

Fortunately, pre-employment tests such as the Wonderlic test and the SHL test, have been developed and fine-tuned to make sure that applicants are not only competent but are also the best possible person that you can give the job. You can find out more about the Wonderlic test here: https://www.wonderlictestprep.com/what-is-the-wonderlic-test.

So let’s take a good look at how such assessments can not only help you hire good employees but also great people that both you and your clients would love to work with for the years to come.

1. It can show you just how the applicant ‘fits the mold’

Personality tests, such as the SHL Personality Questionnaire, and a cognitive test has been used by many prominent companies to measure just how compatible a prospective employee is with your company in terms of behavior and attitude if not their ability to adjust to the work environment and position that they are trying to fill in.

It does this by comparing the responses of the applicants with a personality profile which contains the best possible levels of personality traits of the ideal employee already in that position.

For example, for a customer service position, you would want someone who has good interpersonal skills, perseverance, and some decision-making skills.

For those in upper management, someone with good leadership skills as well as long-term decision-making skills would be ideal.

Other tests measure specific skills that are considered vital to a particular profession like a prospective lawyer’s critical thinking skills with the Watson Glaser Test.

2. Such tests can show you a candidate’s drive

Pre-employment assessment tests are not only able to measure a person’s abilities that are related to their occupation, they can also help hiring managers have a good view of an applicant’s drive and motivations.

Unlike interviews where answers can be rehearsed to the point that everything can sound genuine, these tests have special algorithms put into place which can warn you if an applicant is purposefully manipulating their answers.

Alternatively, these can also be used to prove just how honest they are with you if their results and their interview process reveal the same behavioral profile.

This means that by utilizing such a test, you can prevent yourself from hiring a lazy assistant manager, a standoffish clerk, or an unmotivated salesperson, saving you the trouble of having to wait for the end of their contract.

Unless the candidate managed to make good use of a SHL practice test of sorts, then it is virtually impossible to cheat this exam.

3. They measure one’s decision-making and time management skills well

While this is more prevalent in the Wonderlic test as it was designed to measure that skill along with a person’s cognitive abilities as a whole, many pre-employment exams out there have a secondary function or purpose of allowing a company to have first-hand knowledge of how well they handle a situation.

In the case of the Wonderlic test, test-takers are forced to make a compromise between trying to answer all 50 questions within the 12-minute time limit or just focusing on ones that they are sure to land points on but risk not getting as much in the end.

Other assessments, however, are more extensive, and can even give you a preview of what sort of person the candidate is at the workplace.

While these tests can come in many different names and brands, they are specifically known as situational judgement tests.

Unlike the Wonderlic Assessment and SHL test, these exams work by presenting a number of scenarios to the test-taker and they will be tasked with figuring out which of the listed choices is the best course of action to take in order to resolve them.

These situations are generally curated to mimic the problems that an employee in the job position that they want encounters on a regular, if not daily basis.

Through this, you can immediately know if they are the right person for the job because you will see from their responses just what kind of employee they are and what their methodology looks like when trying to resolve a conflict, misunderstanding, confrontation, or even just social missteps at the office.

Some situational judgement tests are even designed to focus on particular job positions and their related tasks such as accounting, administrative, and sometimes even healthcare-related activities where technical terms (such as legal jargon and procedures) have to be understood and complex calculations (such as medicine dosage for a particular bodyweight, among other factors) will have to be performed in order for them to figure out which course of action needs to be taken.