Insufficient prowess is a top reason why many startups close their doors. Finding suitable candidates to handle the venture’s critical operations can be intimidating for most emerging startups and SMEs. Making a bad hire can be expensive and detrimental in the long haul. 

Unfortunately, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to hiring or outsourcing that will ensure your startup efficiently hires the right and top talent to propel it to scalable heights. On the other hand, there are tools to help you in the process. That’s where pre-employment testing comes into place. 

Don’t get it wrong. Resume screening and interviews can give you insights into a candidate’s background and work experience. Nevertheless, these considerations aren’t assurance that a candidate has the suitable cognitive abilities, emotional intelligence, integrity, and importantly, guarantee that they will stay with your company for a long time, even in the critical stages. 

Pre-employment testing is an advanced way of gathering maximum and relevant information about job applicants before making a hiring decision. It streamlines and enhances the recruitment process, consequently introducing an element of objectivity into the hiring process. 

Still, there is more. This post elucidates the essence of pre-employment testing for your startup and the best practices to ensure your yet-to-be-established venture hires high-quality talent. 

The benefits of pre-employment testing for your startup

Pre-employment tests are a professionally developed and well-validated series of assessment tools used by hiring managers, HR departments, and businesses to screen potential candidates, garner insights into their capabilities and traits. As a result, companies understand the individuals they are hiring and the best match for their organization. Even better, pre-employment tests are perfect for filtering and managing vast applicant pools. 

The most prevalent forms of pre-employment tests include aptitude, cognitive, personality, emotional intelligence, risk, and skill tests. Here is how these considerations will play an essential role in your startup’s maturation: 

Enhanced performance and productivity

Professionally developed and well-validated pre-employment tests can help forecast an employee’s productivity in a vast pool of job types and industries. When appropriately incorporated with the right key performance indicators, pre-employment tests can accurately predict performances since they objectively determine the extent to which a prospect has the knowledge and knack to operate well. 

Your startup implementing testing procedures that immerse prospects in crucial job roles will go a long way in forecasting long-term success on the job. Moreover, the practicality of pre-employment testing depends on its precision and job relevance. As a result, productive pre-employment tests accords employers confidence that a potential team member is ready and willing to take on the role while meeting performance expectations. 

Attracts top talent

First and foremost, you have to pinpoint the traits essential for success in a particular role. Subsequently, with pre-employment tests, it will be more feasible to identify applicants that fulfill that role. It helps your startup hire the best-suited candidates for the job and organization. 

In addition, some talented individuals coy from applying for specific positions with the trepidation of long interviews. However, by sharing your recruitment process, indicating that your startup relies on skill-based assessments to measure competency in lieu of relying on interviews, there is a high likelihood of attracting a whole set of talented prospects. 

Provides a high level of objectivity

Unconscious bias is a significant impediment hindering a successful screening and recruitment process. It’s rare to be genuinely objective when searching for the ideal candidate to handle some startup’s operation. Pre-hire testing helps eliminate hiring bias and offers an accurate strategy to gauge prospects’ proficiency and rate their skills. 

Instead of deciding whether an individual is ideal for a role based on gut feeling or your personal opinion, a candidate’s demographic, and background, impartial tests of the candidate’s skill can help you narrow down the most qualified talent. 

Speeds up the hiring process

Conducting interviews and checking references can be a time-consuming process. The internet has made it easier for job-seekers to apply for jobs in this fast-paced modernization era. However, rapidly growing applicant pools make it worse for recruiters to manage applicant flow and find the ideal candidates. It’s getting worse considering some jobseekers, resume spanners, distribute their resumes across the web without considering the required qualifications or job fit. As you can imagine, it’s almost impossible for recruiters to have the capacity to review every candidate’s application extensively. 

However, thanks to pre-employment tests, hiring managers can afford time-saving value if they incorporate these tests at the top of the hiring process. Moreover, it’s getting better since most firms are now automating the early stages of the screening process. Pre-hiring assessments help your startup efficiently handle the vast pool of prospects applying for available positions. For instance, you can set a minimum score that a candidate must achieve before progressing to the next round. Consequently, it helps you narrow down the field and weed out resume spanners without wasting resources on the phone or in-person interviews. 

Increased employee retention

High turnover is a significant impediment hindering the maturation of most startups. Moreover, a high employee turnover rate is a warning sign that your startup is about to shut its doors. By hiring the wrong individuals, you will end up spending lots of necessary resources trying to replace the lost workforce. Not to mention, employees leaving an organization regardless of their cause demoralizes the morale of the remaining staff leading to low productivity. 

Therefore, it’s essential to hire employees with the suitable amplitude, appropriate temperament, and personality to handle the type of work. In addition, pre-employment testing can increase employee retention by ensuring you don’t hire poorly qualified personnel, candidates who might not complete the training program, and individuals who might quit of their own will. 

In sum, pre-hiring testing reduces voluntary and involuntary turnover by ensuring candidates have realistic expectations about the job and have an excellent skill set to handle projects successfully. 

Pre-employment testing best practices

As lucrative as pre-testing seems, still, it can be a double-edged sword. For instance, bombarding your candidates with irrelevant and endless tests can make the most qualified talents drop out of the recruitment process. Therefore, it would be best to keep a few best practices to ensure pre-employment testing delivers the desired outcomes. In addition, they help ensure your strategy is legally defensible: 

• Avoid test questions that are overly personal and considered offensive. 
• Ensure the validity of your test data. Please choose the proper tests and entertain their validity and reliability as a starting point. 
• Align your pre-employment testing with your brand, ideally by customizing them as much as possible. For instance, you can customize the process with suitable pre-hiring software by adding team photos or videos to make the assessment a more interactive experience. 
• Don’t rely solely on the test results to choose candidates. Instead, it would be best to use them complimentary with interviews. 

It’s almost impractical to pinpoint all the benefits of pre-employment testing for your startup. However, a pre-hiring system that offers validated and reliable tests will go a long way in ensuring your startup hires the right person who will guarantee your growing venture attains optimal success.