Pre-employment assessments are helpful hiring tools for a variety of reasons: They can predict an applicant’s ability to perform tasks, give insight into how they’ll interact with co-workers and customers, and enable managers to make more informed decisions. Plus, these tests potentially remove bias from the hiring process and reduce the time it takes to identify the ideal candidates.
Sprockets is a particularly effective solution with unique pre-employment assessments that reveal the best applicant even before the interview. Our AI-powered platform features a sophisticated applicant matching system that finds the common thread between your top performers and potential hires, empowering you to build better teams and improve employee retention by an average of 43%!
An Overview of Pre-Employment Assessments for the Hiring Process
Pre-employment assessments vary, covering everything from hard skills (experience) to soft skills (personality traits). There are generally five types of tests. These include:
1. Hard Skills Tests
These assessments measure the technical expertise of the candidate in a particular subject area or industry. Recruiters and hiring managers often use these to weed out applicants who do not have the minimum required skills for the job.
(Be careful with these, though, because applicants with no industry experience can actually be the best hires!)
2. Work Sample Tests
Work sample tests help you understand a candidate’s potential effectiveness in the workplace by mimicking events that would occur on the job. They are useful for predicting performance since you get a more realistic preview of how they would behave on a day-to-day basis at your company.
3. Interview Assessments
Of course, there’s always the traditional interview assessment to determine job fit. This crucial step in the recruiting process is an opportunity to test both hard skills and soft skills as well as meet the candidate in person.
There are typically two general ways to conduct interviews: structured and unstructured. Structured interviews allow every applicant to answer the same set of questions in the same order. This can reduce bias and maintain the consistency of data used to evaluate candidates.
On the other hand, unstructured interviews simply aim to build rapport between the interviewer and the candidate. The unstructured format allows more freedom for the conversation to flow naturally. This is typically the better option when evaluating applicants for positions and industries that involve customer service, like home health care and quick-service restaurants.
4. Cognitive Ability Tests
Cognitive ability tests improve the recruiting process by enabling you to assess a candidate’s decisions during an unexpected situation. This is done using “game-based” assessments, which test cognitive skills in a faster, efficient, and user-friendly way.
5. Personality Tests
You can also use personality tests to hone in on specific characteristics that contribute to an applicant’s soft skills, like communication, teamwork, and work ethic. Sprockets’ three-question surveys, for instance, use natural language processing to measure over 50 different personality traits!
Predict Applicant Success With Pinpoint Precision
Improve employee retention, reduce the costs of turnover, and build better team cohesion with Sprockets! Our AI-powered solution has all the ingredients for the optimal hiring process, including sophisticated pre-employment assessments. Sprockets uses brief surveys to find out what makes your top performers tick, and then it evaluates incoming applicants with that benchmark. You’ll instantly see “fit scores” that indicate who has the highest likelihood to succeed and stay long-term.
Numerous business owners from top brands, like Chick-fil-A and Visiting Angels, trust Sprockets to hire the best candidates. Curtis Wilhelmi of McDonald’s says, “It’s a no-brainer!” Schedule a demo today to discover the ideal applicants and start enjoying the same success.