From Face-to-Face Interviews to Hiring Assessments Online – How Staffing is Set for an Immense Change in the Next Decade

The main objective of HR professionals is to make sure their companies always keep growing and recruiting the best professionals. However, due to the COVID19 pandemic and technological disruptions, the role of the average HR professional has changed tremendously in the past year. While access to technology has simplified the process of screening candidates, many companies are still grappling with the idea of letting go of traditional modes of recruitment. Real-life face-to-face interviews are being quickly replaced by online assessments. Here’s why  

The Need for Better Recruitment

Traditionally, HR professionals have used tools like face-to-face interviews or group tests to fill vacancies. However, these techniques are proving to be too expensive and too ineffective. Companies from various industries have reported record numbers of bad hires and undesirable employee retention rates. In this era of hyper-competition, bad recruitments aren’t costs that most companies can afford.

• Bad recruitments lead to compromised quality of work, reductions in productivity levels, and most importantly – lost time. Face-to-face interviews or group tests aren’t objective. The various biases and inefficiencies involved in these recruitment strategies more than often lead companies to hire workers who aren’t fit for the job.

• When these unqualified workers enter the workforce, no amount of training is helpful enough to make them worthwhile long-term investments. Firing them only to recruit and train new sets of workers costs companies even more. In 2017, 3 out of 4 companies suffered from bad hires. The companies lost close to $15,000 on each bad hire.

• According to Harvard Business Review, close to 80% of employee retention issues are caused by poor hiring practices. Companies also lose a lot of money setting up traditional hiring strategies. For example, a company can spend up to $10,000 just to accommodate every applicant that walks inside their buildings for face-to-face interviews.

It’s clear that traditional hiring practices (like face-to-face interviews) are way too costly and flawed for competitive businesses. HR departments don’t want to make wrong hiring decisions either. The recruitment industry is well aware of these flaws in traditional hiring practices. That’s why they’re seeking avenues to reduce them. One advancement in the HR industry that’s helping recruitment managers increase their quality of hires is the rise of pre-employment tests.

Online-Based Pre-Employment Tests – Why Are They So Effective?

It’s safe to say that the Internet has made the average professional more efficient. Be it the ability to communicate ideas quickly or assess large sets of information – workers are able to produce better quality results when they’re online. Similarly, tools like online interviews or online pre-employment tests improve recruiter efficiency. More efficient recruiters are able to hire better-quality candidates.

Online-based pre-employment tests, in particular, help recruiters identify qualified candidates far quicker. The faster they recognize the candidates that have the basic cognitive skills, aptitudes, and personality skills required to carry out the job roles in question, the more time they can devote to getting to know these high-quality candidates. Industry-leading hiring assessments online enables smarter hiring decisions in various ways –

Eliminating the Risk of Lies

Most candidate resumes contain some form of lies. Deception is very common in traditional hiring practices like face-to-face interviews. However, in online-based pre-employment assessments, candidates can’t exaggerate their abilities. For example, if a candidate says he is great at using Adobe Illustrator, the pre-employment test will contain detailed questions that test their actual skill levels in Adobe Illustrator.

Of course, other qualities are also tested in online pre-employment tests. But, just by eliminating the risk of deception from the recruitment process, hiring managers are able to improve the quality of their recruitment decisions. Plus, onboarding a candidate whose skills have been verified by pre-employment tests is much easier than onboarding a candidate whose skill levels are relatively unknown.

Recruiters can assess the results of the online pre-employment tests to know exactly what job-specific skills their candidates have or don’t have. Thus, fostering employee development becomes much easier as HR professionals know exactly what skills their employees need to improve. These objective pre-employment tests also lower the company’s costs-per-hire.

Creating Comprehensive Tests

Recruitment managers are using pre-employment test platforms to customize highly detailed skills assessment tests. These tests are relevant, encompass multiple subjects/topics, and can even be customized to feature job-specific questions. For example, a financial company will need to test their candidates – accounting skills, customer service skills, multitasking skills, etc.

The company can easily use a top pre-employment test platform’s library full of subject or job-based tests to create the most comprehensive test for their candidates. The recruiters can choose from tests that’ve been used by other financial companies in the past. Or, they can select important topic-based tests (e.g., a specific test on value-based investing) to test the skill levels of their candidates in specific subjects.

The integration of pre-employment tests into recruitment strategies can help companies reduce attrition rates by 50%. These tests are more time and cost-efficient than traditional hiring practices. They’re currently the best recruitment tool for critically analyzing potential candidates. That’s why their role in modern-day staffing procedures is indispensable.