Here at Criteria, we could go on and on about the benefits of pre-employment testing. After all, it’s what we do, and we see the benefits every day with our customers. But not all benefits are created equally, and some matter more than others.
We put out a survey earlier this year and compiled the results in our second annual 2019 Pre-Employment Testing Benchmark Report. The survey went out to hiring professionals from nearly every industry and company size, some of whom use pre-employment tests in the process. We asked those who used assessments what they considered to be the top three biggest benefits of pre-employment tests, and here’s what we found:
Better quality of hire was almost universally cited as the top benefit to be gained from using assessments in the hiring process, at 92%. This isn’t too surprising. After all, assessments are designed to evaluate the qualities that are associated with job success, enabling them to help predict which candidates are most likely to perform well on the job.
This ties into the second most important benefit, saving time in the hiring process. Pre-employment tests help you prioritize your candidate pool by focusing on the candidates with the highest potential, and one consequence of this is that you end up saving a ton of time. This is especially true if you use assessments earlier in the hiring process to select which candidates to invite to the more time-consuming interview phase.
Next, we see that 50% of respondents said that pre-employment assessments help them reduce bias through objective data. Because scientifically validated assessments provide an objective data point on each candidate, they insert an element of objectivity into the process to help supplement a decision that might otherwise be influenced by intuition alone. As more and more hiring professionals are becoming aware of unconscious bias and the way that it impacts hiring decisions, objective measures of talent will likely become more valuable.
And finally, we see that 41% of respondents found that assessments help them reduce turnover. While not every company has a turnover problem that they’d like to solve, we’ve witnessed time and again that pre-employment tests can help dramatically reduce employee turnover by simply identifying the candidates with the right aptitude and personality fit from the very start. For example, for Criteria customers in high turnover industries, we’ve seen an average reduction in turnover of 48%.
Ultimately, assessments are so powerful because they help you build and define the very workforce that makes your organization run. Better quality of hire is clearly the benefit that resonates the most with HR professionals, but it’s just one of many reasons to incorporate assessments into the hiring process.
