Candidate screening is one of the most important tasks that you have as a recruiter. However, analysing hundreds of CVs for a given position and deciding who to move forward in the recruitment process based on incomplete and insufficient information is an overwhelming responsibility.
Hence, companies naturally look for ways to improve candidate screening and develop a more accurate and valid recruitment process. Pre-employment screening plays an important role in this scenario allowing recruiters to make an evidence-based selection of candidates. Combined with new screening tools, pre-employment tests help to speed up the recruitment process and to select the most suited candidates for a position.
Every time you bring in a new employee your company makes many long-term investments related to onboarding and training. Making the best hiring decisions will have a major impact on your company, leading to increased productivity and lower turnover rates. On the other hand, if you're not able to hire the best fit for a role, chances are that the new employee won’t succeed on the job and all the time, effort and money spent with his integration on the company is lost.
Screening Candidates More Efficiently
It is possible to avoid selecting bad candidates and improve the quality of hire, however, that requires you to go beyond the traditional recruitment methods. Implementing pre-employment screening is a good way of strengthening your recruitment process and screening candidates more efficiently. Pre-employment tests can assess candidates in terms of cognitive ability, emotional intelligence, skills, personality, honesty and integrity and physical ability, among other aspects.
Pre-employment assessments can be one of the most objective ways of predicting job performance and company fit. Nevertheless, you need to carefully choose the pre-employment tests you’ll use during your hiring process. You need to make sure that they’re legal, well-developed, scientifically proven and job-related, so you can use them as an objective source of reliable information to successfully predict employee performance across a wide range of job categories and make hiring decisions based on concrete criteria.
As for which types of pre-employment screening tests to use, you can opt for one or more according to your needs. We at skeeled offer recruiters an integrated Personality Test called PCI (Personality Characteristics Inventory) to measure the Big Five dimensions of the candidates’ personality in a work behavioural context. Our choice is precisely based on the research that shows that assessing personality is a reliable method of predicting future job performance.
Assessing Candidates’ True Potential
Candidates often include misleading statements in their CVs and provide inaccurate information during face-to-face interviews while trying to impress the recruiter. This makes the traditional methods for gathering information subjective and unreliable. Yet, a personality test can provide recruiters with objective and reliable data-driven insights that combined with the usual evaluation elements (CV and interview) help them see through the candidates and make better hiring decisions.
The Personality test measures workplace personality traits and occupational scores that are predictive of job performance. For instance, personality traits like achievements striving, cooperation or leadership orientation, among others, play an important part in one’s job performance.
By providing you with an overview of a candidate’s behavioural tendencies it allows you to understand if a candidate will, in fact, be a top performer and if he will fit the culture of the company. Thus, the personality test results allow recruiters to assess candidates more accurately than by simply analysing a CV. Therefore, it helps recruiters spot candidates’ true potential and make the right recruitment call.
The bottom line is, the competition for the best talent is fierce and you need to drive an efficient recruitment process in order to attract and retain top talent for your company. Driving an evidence-based hiring process can definitely help recruiters make the best hiring decisions and avoid the high costs of bad hires.
Using pre-employment screening tests in general, and a personality assessment in particular, not only prevent you from letting poor candidates make it to the final stage of your recruitment process and get hired but also help you identify exceptional candidates that would otherwise go unnoticed through the traditional screening methods.
Skeeled offers you the perfect opportunity to bring innovation and digitalisation to your hiring. Check our website or our LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook pages for further information.
Thanks for reading and see you next time!
Your team here at skeeled
