According to 2021 Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data, the turnover rate for the year was 57.3%. The BLS found that approximately 29% of turnover is involuntary, whereas approximately 25% of attrition is voluntary. Regardless of the cause of turnover within an organization, hemorrhaging employees can be devastating to staff morale, brand reputation, and overall profitability.
If you are involved in hiring and training employees at your organization, you know firsthand just how frustrating this turnover can be. Fortunately, the best pre-employment assessments offer a viable antidote for high turnover. These screening tools can facilitate better and faster hiring processes while simultaneously ensuring that chosen candidates are a good fit for your organization.
What Is a Pre-Employment Assessment?
As the name suggests, a pre-employment assessment is a screening tool administered before an employment offer is made. These assessments are most effective when used early in the hiring process, as this allows HR teams to avoid scheduling interviews with underqualified applicants.
Your HR team can use pre-employment assessments to measure a candidate’s skills and abilities. These skills tests can accurately gauge job-specific abilities or more general talents such as attention to detail or logical reasoning. By using skills testing and pre-employment assessments, hiring teams can gain valuable insights into an applicant’s fit for a vacancy.
In addition to skills tests, behavioral assessments can be utilized as a pre-employment screening tool. Behavioral assessments have become increasingly popular as employers strive to create positive work environments.
This screening tool can reveal an applicant’s motivations, work ethic, and personality traits. Hiring teams can use this data to predict how productive a candidate will be in a given role.
How Pre-Employment Tests Lead to Better Hires
As noted above, over half of turnover can be attributed to involuntary separations. While many factors can cause a company to terminate an employee, involuntary separations are almost always linked to underperformance or an inability to contribute positively to company culture.
Modern pre-employment tests can significantly reduce separation-related turnover by helping businesses avoid mis-hires. As an added benefit, pre-employment screening assessments can lead to better staff morale as businesses can ensure that new hires have the skills necessary to excel in their assigned roles.
Pre-employment tests not only mitigate involuntary separations, but they can reduce voluntary turnover as well. Modern screening tools allow employers to match prospective candidates with positions that suit their unique combination of abilities and personality traits. This matching will translate into higher job satisfaction, better performance, and greater productivity.
How Pre-Employment Assessments Reduce Turnover
Traditionally, hiring even a single employee can be a costly endeavor. In addition to screening employees, filling vacancies requires a business to invest in recruiting and onboarding/training resources.
While these actions are necessary for developing a quality workforce, businesses must retain new hires for at least 12 weeks post-onboarding if they want to experience a return on their investment. Otherwise, all of those resources are wasted.
Pre-employment assessments do not completely eliminate the costs of hiring new staff. However, they can drastically reduce these costs by allowing your team to hire faster and more efficiently.
For example, your staff can administer skills tests to your entire applicant pool. They can then review the results of these assessments and immediately narrow their search to a condensed group of highly qualified applicants.
After this process is complete, they can conduct interviews, perform background checks, and verify past work experience. This approach is far more efficient than interviewing every applicant.
Top Pre-Employment Tests for Reducing Turnover
Now that we have discussed how pre-employment screening tests reduce turnover let’s identify which assessments are most effective at accomplishing this goal. When selecting a pre-employment assessment to screen prospective employees, you must choose skills tests relevant to the vacancy you need to fill.
For instance, if you hire childcare professionals to work at your facility, you may want to administer the Child Care skills assessment. This skills test covers child development, child growth, curriculum, equipment, and materials. The assessment includes 40 questions of various types, including multiple select, simple select, and true-false.
In addition to job-specific pre-employment assessments, you may also want to implement more generalized skills tests. One popular ability and aptitude skills test is Multitasking Simulation. This assessment covers managing emails, replying to chat messages, handling orders, and responding to consumers.
All skills assessments are administered exclusively online. Online delivery means that you do not need to invest in costly testing supplies such as booklets and answer sheets. Once a candidate completes their assigned assessment, you and your team can review their results immediately. This automation will substantially streamline the applicant evaluation process, leading to faster and better hiring.
Pre-Employment Assessment Solutions from eSkill
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