Benefits of pre-employment testing for employers

At TestGorilla, we believe in practicing what we preach. We’ve been doing skills-based hiring right from the beginning, hiring all of our own team using our own tests.

So, without further ado, let’s focus on all the benefits of skills-based recruitment through pre-employment testing as opposed to relying on a resume.

10 benefits of pre-employment testing for employers

Here are the top 10 benefits of pre-employment testing for employers and recruiters:

1. Save time and resources

Time is one thing you can’t get back, and time often equals money. The average job role receives around 250 resumes from candidates, and often even more. Recruiters and hiring managers take significant time to go through them, even if they only give each resume a quick skim reading.

Applicant tracking systems (ATSs) can help lighten the load. However, there is a risk of missing out on candidates who might be a great fit for your open role but don’t have the right keywords on their resumes for the ATS to pick up on.

As a side note, online testing platforms now often provide integration with ATS systems. TestGorilla offers all these integrations and APIs to make your recruitment process faster and smoother:

• Freshteam integration
• iCIMS integration
• BambooHR integration
• Bullhorn integration
• Breezy integration
• Greenhouse integration
• Recruitee integration
• JazzHR integration
• SmartRecruiters integration
• Zapier integration
• Lever integration
• Workable integration
• Teamtailor integration

Whether an organization is a startup, scale-up, or huge multinational, pre-employment testing saves time and resources because it reduces reliance on the resume. Applicants generally take the tests or assessments through the online link you send them, and the results are sent directly to you for comparison.

It’s fast, simple, and stress-free. Even better, there’s not a resume in sight.

Want to see some real-life examples proving that pre-employment testing saves money? Studio Le Pera saved around €2,000 on hiring costs by using pre-employment testing instead of traditional screening methods. And Gardenvity slashed its hiring costs by up to 80% when it moved to using skills testing for candidates.

2. Use pre-employment testing for blue-collar jobs too

Many people assume that online skills testing is only for white-collar workers, but did you know you can also use it successfully as part of the hiring process for blue-collar jobs?

Although popular for white-collar jobs, skills testing has remained relatively uncommon for blue-collar roles. The reason for this is probably that most blue-collar jobs involve some form of manual labor, and employers often feel there’s not much need to assess applicants remotely for such positions.

It’s also not possible to assess practical job-specific skills in an online test. Though you can test skills theoretically with online skills tests, this doesn’t work with practical skills. For example, you can only tell if a candidate is good at welding by seeing them at work and checking their results.

The best approach to hiring for blue-collar roles is a combination of skills assessments for all or most candidates and a job trial or a simulation for those you choose to shortlist.

You can also use pre-employment screening for blue-collar candidates to test for skills that are important in all roles, not just job-specific ones. For example, communication skills, time management, and attention to detail are required skills for most jobs. These abilities are not always evident during interviews, so being able to test candidates for them is a big benefit.

After all, it’s much easier (and cheaper) to test for skills like this than to give the job to an applicant who looks good on paper but turns out to be constantly late, doesn’t communicate well with others, and is prone to missing all but the most obvious details.

So, using non-job-specific skills testing can greatly improve the quality of hire.

TestGorilla has developed some online role-specific skills tests for blue-collar jobs, including the following:

• Tests for warehouse pickers and supervisors
• Hospitality tests for hotels with and without restaurants
• A Fundamentals of Electricity test for electricians, construction workers, electrical maintenance personnel, line installers and repairers, power plant operators, and other roles that require knowledge of electrical systems
• An Equipment Maintenance test for technicians, mechanics, service people, maintenance support personnel, and anyone else who performs equipment maintenance involving complex heavy machinery inspection, maintenance, troubleshooting, and overhaul

One thing that we don’t offer (and can’t be tested online) is physical fitness testing for jobs such as warehouse or factory workers.

Many roles in these areas require different degrees of strength, stamina, flexibility, and balance to do the job safely and efficiently. You must conduct these kinds of physical ability tests in person, and many employers incorporate some kind of physical test into their candidate-screening process.

3. Identify qualified candidates

One of the big problems with traditional recruitment methods is the time spent finding qualified candidates and eliminating unqualified ones. Resumes are not an accurate predictor of job success, and hard data says they are not the best tool for hiring.

Many applicants resort to “spamming” their resumes in bulk to hundreds of job openings without even looking at the job description or reading the ad. The good news is that applicant tracking systems (ATSs) have been developed to sniff out these spam resumes to save you the trouble.

However, applicants are now fighting back with ways to beat the resume bots, which could mean that you’ll still end up with a percentage of unqualified candidates.

Consider this scenario:

You’ve gone through the ATS-passed resumes yourself. Eventually, you draw up your interview list of supposedly qualified candidates and arrange interviews with them.

To your frustration, you discover at the interview that some of them haven’t been truthful about their skill levels on their resumes, and some of the spammers who sneaked through haven’t got a clue about the role you’re hiring for.

You’ve wasted time and resources on interviewing these chancers and have to start from scratch again.

Pre-employment testing is a streamlined yet simple solution to this. Assessments and tests can filter out unsuitable candidates effectively and accurately without you having to look at a resume first.

One thing you should research is exactly who creates the tests on platforms you think you might like to use. If they’re not built around the principles of test theory or written and reviewed by those with extensive knowledge of and experience in the subject, how much use will the tests actually be?

At TestGorilla, we take a scientific approach to test creation.

It all starts with our psychometrics team. First, we use the proven and well-established principles of test theory to design the framework for our tests.

Then, subject-matter experts in each field develop the questions for these tests with guidance from our team. These tests are then peer-reviewed by other experts to ensure their accuracy and effectiveness. We also constantly review and update our tests to ensure they stay relevant and reflect any industry changes and advancements.

Our work doesn’t stop there. Our advanced statistical algorithms analyze key indicators that verify and improve our tests on an ongoing basis. We also use measures such as Cronbach’s alpha to help us track and confirm the internal consistency of the questions in our tests.

Where data sample sizes allow, we perform reliability studies and all studies to date have achieved acceptable statistical thresholds. Specifically, in late 2022, we conducted analysis on TestGorilla’s most frequently used full version tests.

All our tests met or exceeded the industry benchmark for test reliability or internal consistency statistics with an average Cronbach’s alpha of 0.898, and a range of 0.704 to 0.999. [Industry accepted reliability values: 0.7+ = Acceptable, 0.8+ = Good, 0.9+ = Great].

As data collection allows, TestGorilla continues to conduct reliability analyses to guide ongoing enhancements to our assessments and test library, including creating an even more efficient and streamlined candidate assessment experience for tests with high levels of internal consistency.

We also encourage multiple methods of evaluation throughout the recruitment process, and do not endorse using any single data point for decision making.

The best pre-employment testing platforms are transparent about how their tests are created and provide information about who is writing the tests. All of our test pages have clear information about our subject-matter experts, including their experience and qualifications.

By checking that tests on your chosen platform are created to the highest standards, you can reliably identify top scorers who have proven their skills in the tests.

4. Compare qualified candidates

Pre-employment testing enables you to compare qualified candidates at a glance. The results from your chosen tests and assessments should be easy to read and understand to save you time and effort.

With TestGorilla, for example, you can discover your strongest candidates with our easy-to-read output reports, rankings, and analytics. You’re able to easily switch from a comprehensive overview to a detailed analysis of your candidates and go beyond the data by watching personalized candidate videos.

Of course, setting benchmarks is important for getting accurate results.

Benchmarking helps measure your candidates’ performance on the tests you gave them – after all, a candidate’s score doesn’t tell you much if you have nothing to compare it with.

If you’re looking to hire an SEO specialist, it would be helpful to know how other SEO specialists perform on the tests you have chosen for your assessment.

TestGorilla handles this through our scoring benchmark feature. We present candidate scores as percentiles, benchmarking each candidate against different norm groups.

We make it possible for you to choose the benchmark group (or norm group) most relevant to your assessment. This is why we ask candidates to provide some demographic information at the end of every assessment.

To learn more about test results and benchmarks, take a look through our guide to analyzing results and scoring benchmarks.

5. Make unbiased hiring decisions

Using resumes alone for applicant screening can lead to biased decisions and discrimination. These biases can be conscious or unconscious (implicit bias). Although evidence shows that implicit-bias training can successfully raise awareness, it’s unclear how long the effects of this last if the training isn’t followed up, which it usually isn’t.

There’s also no strong or conclusive proof that a typical implicit-bias training session can effectively reduce unconscious bias.

Many recruiters and hiring managers believe that they are completely unbiased, but research shows that unconscious bias is a natural human tendency.

This is because signals from the amygdala (the part of our brain responsible for detecting and responding to immediate threats) play a key role in our urge to sort individuals into a preferred in-group versus a less trusted out-group.

Of course, unconscious biases don’t just relate to race or gender. In many cases, they’re linked to more subtle factors, such as a preference for candidates who have the same educational background, are from the same hometown, or share interests with the hiring manager. (This is known as affinity bias.)

Pre-employment skills testing is a great way to reduce bias and promote diversity in the hiring process because the results are a firm, quantitative indicator of job-relevant suitability. Resumes, on the other hand, may enable great candidates to slip through the cracks because of unconscious bias.

6. Reduce time-to-hire

The best candidates are off the market in 10 days, according to LinkedIn’s top 100 hiring statistics for 2022. However, the average length of the hiring process is 36 days. That’s a massive disparity, meaning that the top applicants may accept another job offer long before you have a chance to interview them.

To add to that, more than half of job seekers lose interest in a job if the hiring process is too long.

LinkedIn’s hiring statistics also show that understanding how to optimize the recruitment process can shorten the hiring cycle by 60% while improving quality, so streamlining the system should be one of your top priorities.

Longer hiring processes often affect the whole company. Here’s how:

• They increase cost-per-hire, putting a massive strain on the organization’s budget. 
• You lose out on great candidates because those with faster hiring processes beat you by extending an offer sooner. 
• Longer hiring cycles also lead to a bad candidate experience, which could drag your company’s reputation down. Word spreads fast, and bad reviews on job-hunting sites like Glassdoor will discourage applicants from applying to your business. 
• Current employees have to take on extra work until the vacancies are filled, which can lead to disengagement and low morale.

These factors make it important to reduce the duration of your hiring process.

Pre-employment testing dramatically reduces the time it takes to hire.

Our case studies show that Revolut improved its hiring time by 40%, and Hydroemission cut its time-to-hire by a massive 80%. Testing also helps employers like INMATEC to make faster hiring decisions for complex roles.

7. Reduce turnover

Staff turnover is often an issue for many employers, and it costs time and money.

It could be a case of a new employee not being the best fit for the role, even though they seemed like a great choice on paper.

One unhappy new team member can spread negativity and resentment among their colleagues. And if it’s not addressed, it can lead to established employees becoming demoralized and looking for new job opportunities.

One of the biggest mistakes that organizations make is hiring people who ultimately don’t gel with their company culture.

Over time, it becomes painfully obvious that they aren’t as engaged and productive as they should be, because they just aren’t suited to the company.

One way to find candidates who align with your organization’s values and culture is to use a pre-employment screening test that you can customize to evaluate how well candidates may fit within a role and an existing team. At TestGorilla, we have created our Culture Add test to address this specific question.

“Hiring for culture” is a huge buzzword these days, but we prefer to call it “culture add” rather than “culture fit.” Why? Because culture fit can lead to stagnant groupthink and biases, whereas culture add is the opposite:

• Evolve company culture instead of stagnating culture. Culture fit means “fitting in with the current culture,” but it only brings to the company people who think the same.
• The difference is in ideas, not values. Candidates must possess the same value set as the organization, but they need to have different ideas, perspectives, and backgrounds.
• Encourages diversity and inclusion. Culture fit is all about finding people as similar to the manager as possible. On the other hand, culture add focuses on finding those who share the same value sets but nothing else.

In addition to this, resumes alone are not an accurate predictor of job success. A study conducted by the Tippie College of Business at the University of Iowa found that top resume “boosts” like years of relevant education and experience, interests, and GPA had little to no correlation with later job performance.

In other words, a century of data tells us that the candidate with the most degrees, straight A’s, and work experience isn’t always the “right” candidate.

Pre-employment testing isn’t a magic bullet for reducing staff turnover, but by including tests such as culture add, you can ensure you and your chosen candidate are on the same page.

8. Improve quality of hire

Improving the quality of hire is another way to reduce employee turnover. Pre-employment testing reduces the chance of a mis-hire because candidates can’t fake their skills or experience like they can on a resume.

Thorough pre-employment screening tests and assessments ensure that only qualified candidates make it through to the interviews.

Another way to improve the quality of hire is to ensure you don’t have a skills mismatch. This refers to the difference between the skills required to be successful in a position and the skill set of the employee occupying that position.

An ill-matched employee will struggle with their tasks, which will gradually reduce their motivation and turn into disengagement. Eventually, they will resign (or you will have to fire them), taking your hiring and training investment with them.

Pre-employment assessments helped MedX improve its quality of hire by providing it with a more accurate understanding of candidates for vacant roles and a streamlined hiring process. This gave the company an opportunity to focus its resources on maintaining its high standards.

Before implementing TestGorilla, MedX’s team relied on traditional interviews to get to know its applicants, assess their skills, and decide whom to hire.

However, this process proved inefficient because it didn’t provide enough insights into candidates’ abilities, strengths, and personalities

Another organization that has benefited from pre-employment testing is IDP Education.

In previous months, IDPs marketing team needed to hire for the same role twice. On both occasions, the new employees turned out to be unsuitable for the position and didn’t pass the probation period.

This meant that the team needed to start the recruitment process anew, wasting time and resources. Multiple projects got delayed, and the team’s productivity suffered.

The marketing team found that the ideal solution for this problem was pre-employment testing. They were able to find the right candidates for the positions they needed to fill. The new employees have been doing well and made it through their probation period successfully.

9. Recruit remotely

One of the major benefits of online pre-employment testing is that it enables you to recruit remotely. Remote working is becoming ever more popular, even in the post-pandemic world. Whether employers like it or not, remote working is here to stay and is set to increase in 2023.

There are many benefits to having fully or partially remote teams.

In fact, at TestGorilla, all of our team members work remotely from all across the world and in different time zones, so we have hands-on experience in recruiting and running fully remote teams.

Remote recruitment enables you to tap into a global talent pool and not be limited to a specific area or even country. However, some organizations opt to hire in the country where they’re based to manage the legal complexity of remote work efficiently.

With the right processes in place, you can adapt to remote hiring in no time. And if you’re already hiring remote workers, there are plenty of opportunities to optimize your approach.

You don’t have to run a remote workplace to benefit from the advantages of online candidate assessments, though.

10. Reduce cheating

No one likes to think that candidates will resort to cheating, and the majority of applicants would never dream of doing so. However, desperation to find employment can lead some people to take this route.

Cheating on tests is, however, more common than most of us would like to think, and it tends to start when people are still in school.

For example, an OEDB study shows that 60.8% of college students have admitted to cheating on assignments and tests. What’s more alarming is that 16.5% of them didn’t regret doing it.

Sadly, this suggests that those same college students will have no qualms about attempting to cheat on pre-employment tests or lying on their resumes.

So, when you are looking for pre-employment testing platforms, it’s important to check how strong their anti-cheating measures are.

How do candidates attempt to cheat?

To understand which anti-cheating measures work best, it’s important to know exactly how candidates may try to cheat. Some common methods include:

• Sharing answers. After taking an assessment, an applicant may share the questions and answers with others by either widely distributing them online or sharing them with a small circle of friends who are applying for the same role.
• Soliciting outside help. A candidate may enlist someone else to take the test for them or complete the test with someone’s help.
• Taking the test multiple times. A candidate may try to find a way to take the test more than once to improve their score.
• Tampering with results. An applicant may try to exploit security weaknesses in the software or tamper directly with their results in the test database.
• Searching for answers online. A test-taker may use another browser window or even another monitor to look up the answers to the test.

One of the easiest ways for a candidate to cheat is to look up a test platform’s questions and answers online. When you are considering a testing platform, find out whether they can prevent this. For example, at TestGorilla, we:

• Disable copy and paste
• Cycle questions for each test
• Limit the maximum number of times a question is given
• Impose a time limit for each test
• Prevent candidates from registering as test customers to see the test questions

It’s vital to know if your candidates attempt to cheat, so ensure your testing platform has an anti-cheating monitor. Also, if a candidate knows you’re monitoring them as they take the test, they’ll likely be less inclined to cheat.

Our anti-cheating monitor will alert you if we detect any red flags from a candidate. If there are, it doesn’t necessarily mean the candidate is cheating. You’ll just have to use careful judgment when determining how to use the information.

Other ways to reduce the risk of cheating include the following:

• Preventing duplicate entries to stop a candidate from using a second email address to take an assessment twice. 
• Recording a candidate’s IP address. If a candidate’s assessment is accessed from multiple IP addresses, it could indicate that they had help taking the test from someone in another location.
• Ensuring candidates take the test in full-screen mode so that they can’t open new tabs or searches and using mouse tracking to ensure they aren’t using a hidden monitor.
• Taking webcam snapshots to ensure the real candidate is taking the test. For example, TestGorilla takes snapshots every 30 seconds. Note: To ensure candidates’ privacy, we make sure that each candidate agrees to the terms before starting an assessment. The snapshots are not meant to be intrusive but rather to ensure honesty. However, you do have the option to turn off this feature.

If you’re serious about preventing cheating, you should ensure your testing software is serious about cybersecurity. The software should follow the highest cybersecurity standards to protect you and your candidates from all angles.

TestGorilla received the SOC2 compliance certificate after completing an independent outside audit. Obtaining this certification means TestGorilla meets the AICPA standards for data security, and you should check that your chosen pre-employment testing platform also meets these standards.