Pre-Employment Tests For Home Healthcare Aides
Top Skills and Abilities:
- Service Orientation
- Active Listening
- Oral Expression
- Critical Thinking
- Oral Comprehension
Top 3 Tasks:
- Maintain records of patient care, condition, progress, or problems to report and discuss observations with supervisor or case manager.
- Check patients' pulse, temperature, and respiration.
- Provide patients with help moving in and out of beds, baths, wheelchairs, or automobiles and with dressing and grooming.
Overview
Home healthcare aides tend to elderly, chronically ill, and disabled patients. They usually work in the patient's home and help the patient perform tasks such as bathing, eating, and getting dressed. They also sometimes complete basic housekeeping tasks, such as cleaning. Home healthcare aide positions are expected to grow 40% by 2026, an extraordinary growth rate that is in large part a result of the aging of the Baby Boomer generation. Becoming a home healthcare aide requires no formal education, as most aides receive on-the-job training from an experienced aide, nurse, or hospice worker. Aides working with an agency are trained and certified, and hiring managers can target applicants with a combination of certification and experience. Training usually involves lessons in areas such as personal hygiene, reading vital signs, and nutrition. Some home healthcare aides are also authorized to give medication under a nurse's supervision.
Requirements
Compassion and attentiveness are essential traits for home healthcare aides. They need to be able to take basic care of their patient and respond quickly if and when a crisis occurs. Integrity and trustworthiness are also very vital in these positions, due to the fact that aides work long hours in patients' homes with access to personal belongings. Hiring managers who want to assess the dependability and trustworthiness of their candidates, and also select applicants who will be patient and cooperative with clients, will often use two personality tests offered by Criteria Corp.
Assessments for Home Healthcare Aides
The Workplace Productivity Profile (WPP) measures conscientiousness, integrity, and reliability and helps mitigate the risk of applicants engaging in counterproductive and harmful workplace behaviors such as theft. The Customer Service Aptitude Profile (CSAP) assesses personality traits that are highly correlated to being able to compassionately care for clients. Since effective communication skills, basic literacy and numeracy, and attention to detail are also crucial skills for home health aides, the Criteria Basic Skills Test (CBST) is also an accurate predictor of performance in these positions. Thus, it is popular with employers who are hoping to decrease turnover amongst their home health aides.
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Source: U.S. Department of Labor