Pre-employment screening tests - "Yes" or "No" ?

I am often asked by recruiters and employers about the need of using pre-employment testing. While I have found pre-employment tests to be beneficial in helping to screen and select the best candidates for jobs, they are not always the only thing to be considered while selecting a candidate. Let go step by step on understanding this.

What are pre-employment tests?

Pre-employment tests are used to screen job applicants and can include testing of cognitive abilities, knowledge, work skills, personality, emotional intelligence, language proficiency, and sometimes even integrity. Companies use online testing to find the candidates most likely to successfully fill the open positions and to screen out those who are unqualified.

Why are they used?

By helping companies and recruiters identify the candidates most likely to perform well on the job, pre-employment testing can lead to additional company benefits, such as saving time and cost in the selection process.

What are the key issues in using pre-employment tests?

While there can be vast benefits gained from using testing in the employee selection process, there are potential issues companies need to understand prior to implementing any tests.

The first issue is validity; whether or not the test measures the specific criterion it is supposed to measure. For the test to be valid a good job profile should be used by the test administrator.

The second issue is reliability, the consistency with which a test measures a skill. “For a test to be reliable, an individual’s score should be about the same every time the individual takes it (allowing for the effects of practice)”. If someone takes the test on one day and scores low, then takes the test a week later and receives a high score, the test is probably not very reliable. This would mean, the test administrator needs to have a large pool of questions with varied difficulty levels. The testing tool should be computer adaptive where in the difficulty level of questions are changed based on response of candidate. This will ensure a reliable score every time.

Shall I use the pre-employment tests?

My suggestion will be “Yes”. But don’t fully depend on the test.

Employers can increase the likelihood of hiring high-quality candidates by using pre-employment tests to help screen the best candidates for jobs. Administered correctly, pre-employment testing can help companies save time and cost in the selection process.

A final call should be taken on screened candidates by using a more personal one on one interview approach.

Online assessment reports increases recruiter productivity and revenue by 16%

As a recruiter, you have to take care of many things – vetting resumes, finding and calling candidates, shortlisting, negotiating and then ensuring that you get paid for your effort. All of these take time. So how would you increase productivity of your team without investing in expensive new tools and more recruiters?

More effective recruitment practices and better understanding of an employer’s requirement will obviously help, but our research suggest that you can easily increase productivity in fulfilling positions by 16% on average. All you have to do is something very simple – Conduct a screening test and attach the report with the resume before sending it to the employer.

Over the last two years, SkillSign worked with fourteen recruitment consulting firms in US, Canada, Australia and India to understand the impact of written tests conducted by recruiters in final hiring decision. SkillSign has been providing online testing platform to these firms. These firms were requested to provide hiring data based on screening done by recruiters themselves. All positions were divided in three categories.

1.     No written screening done by recruiter; though candidates were screened based on resumes and brief telephone chat.

2.     Written screening test conducted but report not attached with resumes submitted to employers

3.     Written screening test report attached with resumes submitted to employers

It’s interesting to note that there is no real difference in second and third vacancy categories, except that written screening test report was attached in third category, but not in the second.

These positions were further categorized on average experience level needed and industry. Survey results were quite interesting, even for the recruiters who provided the data.

·         Screening tests are most effective in junior positions in technology, banking and insurance sectors, and least effective in positions requiring exceptional creativity or high-touch in retail, design and advertising sectors.

·         Conducting screening tests for junior positions and attaching reports with resumes, resulted in 16% more positions fulfilled during the same period. Though we expected the productivity increase; such a drastic improvement surprised even us.

·         Only 22% of employers asked for screening report, though a healthy 75% of them did not mind, and in fact appreciated, the written screening report provided by the recruitment firm.

·         During our discussion with recruiters, we found that that even if an employer initially did not demand a written test report, it gave significant importance to the screening report results in shortlisting candidates for next rounds of interviews. And that seems to have made most of the difference.

·         Employers do not generally expect very specifics screening test from the recruiter. Only 15% of employers provided their own test content. Assessing specific skills is left for later interview rounds. Even a standard but well-crafted aptitude test increases the hiring probability for junior technology or banking positions.

Interestingly, when a recruitment consultant conducted a screening test but did not submit the written report to employer, hiring probability improved by a marginal 0-4%. Apparently, it’s not enough to just conduct a screening test but providing the written report to employers dramatically improves the chances of a candidate being shortlisted for next round and thus the final selection.

Lessons for recruitment firms

You can significantly increase your revenue by getting candidates to take an online screening test and submitting the test result along with resumes to the prospective employer.

SkillSign provides an industry leading solution to quickly create and deliver tests under your own logo, get analytical score cards and email them to employers without requiring any technical knowledge or infrastructure. You can create branded tests in minutes and use them to screen hundreds of candidates. For more details on how SkillSign can help you increase your productivity, email us at recruit@skillsign.com.

Visit us on www.skillsign.com to know more.

Computer Adaptive Testing helps in 40% faster screening of job candidates

Assessment methodology used earlier only by GRE and GMAT is now available to everyone thanks to Cloud Computing.

It' a common complaint of test takers that questions asked were either too easy or too tough and does not allow them to showcase their abilities. The traditional approach to testing administers a fixed set of questions to all test takers. This works reasonably well for the average middle-of-the-bell-curve crowd but fails badly in assessing top or bottom rankers.

That's why every reputed assessment test like GRE and GMAT has moved to Computer Adaptive Testing or CAT.

 

A Computer Adaptive Test works just as it sounds. It adapts. Based on your response to a given question, the system determines the next question to be asked. The CAT provides a more accurate assessment of candidate’s abilities because it administers a customized test that adapts, challenges and showcases candidate’s abilities. A CAT exam needs 40-50% fewer questions to accurately assess a person’s skill, compared to fixed online or paper-based test.

Until now, CAT methodology was available only to large assessors, employers and University. Cloud-based testing service providers have now brought the power of CAT to every recruiter, employer and coaching center. You can now create tests on various online assessment platforms and benefit from superior and faster assessments using adaptive testing.

SkillSign is one such platform which leverages on a cloud-based platform to provide cutting edge Computer Adaptive Testing capability on pay-per-use basis without needing any technical knowledge or expensive IT infrastructure. A recruiter or an employer can now easily differentiate run-of-the-mills from the best and improve their revenue.

If you are interested in knowing more about Computer Adaptive Technology and Online Testing, please visit our website www.skillsign.com

Developing an aptitude test for Freshers

It’s fun to create an aptitude test for new hires. All that you have to do is to add some subjective, some 'IQ' types, some technical question and get those hapless candidates to take the test. Your organization will be thankful to you for the test that you have created and those hapless candidates will rarely complain if you, in an unlikely case, make any mistake!

Right? Wrong!! Are you sure that your new test 

• meets the requirement given in role or job description?
• weighs the different questions in scorecard appropriately based on their difficulty and criticality levels?
• conforms to equal opportunity employment requirement?
• does not give undue importance to a skill or attitude that are not that critical in the job, and vice versa?
•  is not too easy or too difficult to make results useless in screening candidates?
•  has adequate, not more nor less, number and variety of questions to assess the desired skills and behavior.

Creating an aptitude test for new hires is not really difficult but it’s easy to make mistakes and a wrong hiring decision can be very expensive. The above check list was useful when I created or administered tests to thousands of employees for my employers.

Happy Assessing....

Project Management Institute Asia-Pacific events July-Sep 2011

For more details, please visit www.pmi.org

Event	Date	Location
PMINZ National Conference	5-7 Jul-11	Auckland, New Zealand
PMI Japan Forum	16-17 Jul-11	Tokyo, Japan
PMI India National Conference	8-10 Sep-11	Bangalore, India
PMI China Congress	16-17 Sep-11	Beijing, China
PMI HK PM Forum	24-Sep-11	Hong Kong

Developing an aptitude test for recruitment - a Basic Primer

It’s fun to create an aptitude test for new hires. All that you have to do is to add some subjective, some ‘IQ’ types, some technical question and get those hapless candidates to take the test. Your organization will be thankful to you for the test that you have created and those hapless candidates will rarely complain if you, in an unlikely case, make any mistake!

Right? Wrong! Are you sure that your new test

1.       meets the requirement given in role or job description?

2.       weighs the different questions in scorecard appropriately based on their difficulty and criticality levels?

3.       conforms to equal opportunity employment requirement?

4.       does not give undue importance to a skill or attitude that are not that critical in the job, and vice versa?

5.       is not too easy or too difficult to make results useless in screening candidates?

6.       has adequate, not more nor less, number and variety of questions to assess the desired skills and behavior.

Creating an aptitude test for new hires is not really difficult but it’s easy to make mistakes and a wrong hiring decision can be very expensive. The above check list was useful when I created or administered tests to thousands of employees for my employers.

Supervised versus Unsupervised Online test

Unsupervised or unproctored online tests are cost effective and saves time for assessed as well as assessor. If you are looking to hone your skills, these unsupervised tests provide you all the flexibility that you need at a very little cost as I believe that you will be honest to yourself. For behavioral assessments, where there is no clear right or wrong answer, unsupervised tests provide very reliable results.

However, as you would have guessed easily, unsupervised tests expecting specific answers are prone to identity fraud and can be compromised. Many organizations hesitate to use unsupervised test for this reason. But organizations can gain from the flexibility provided by unsupervised tests without losing the integrity of assessment by using one or more of the following methods.

1.       Post-test Validation:

Follow up with questions based on the test during the interview for the shortlisted candidates. This can be very effective if planned right.

2.       Unsupervised screening followed by supervised test for shortlisted candidates

By comparing the scores achieved in different modules of the two tests, one can filter out majority, nut not all, of identity frauds. Assessor also has a choice of using only the latest test score or a suitably weighted average of two tests.

3.        Access control

Allow only previously validated users (student or job candidates) to take the test at a specified time, possibly in conjunction with extra identity validation features like keylogging or webcam snapshot recording.