Hiring the wrong people is one of the biggest mistakes a business can make, and yet companies routinely rush the hiring process and simply deal with the high turnover rates that ensue. This vicious cycle leads to low morale, low productivity, and a poor workplace culture. Hiring assessments help break the cycle by reorienting the hiring process around capabilities, talent, and vulnerabilities rather than a person’s ability to look good on paper and not seem nervous in an interview.
Here are four different roles that a pre-hiring assessment can play during the hiring process:
1. Identifying candidates with the potential for growth.
Whenever you’re hiring someone, whether they’re going to work as a cashier or lead multi-million-dollar projects, you should be looking for people who have the initiative and ability to move up. As the old adage goes, dress for the job you want, not the job you have – along those same lines, you should be looking past the position you’re hiring for today and think about where a candidate could be doing for your organization five years from now. Pre-hiring assessments help gauge this sort of potential by identifying a candidate’s unique strengths, their work style, and the things they value from a career standpoint.
2. Identifying candidates who fill a gap.
While it’s important to identify candidates who will more or less fit in within your workplace culture, it’s also important to find candidates who will challenge the standards you have set and help your company become more diverse and thus stronger. Diversity in terms of personality, background, and approach to leadership can all be great assets in business as long as the candidate is also professional.
3. Identifying candidates who are eager to learn.
With employee assessments, you may find candidates who have all sorts of personality and potential, but who don’t have all the skills they will need to do the job at hand. These candidates are almost always a good investment. Taking the extra time to train a high potential candidate instead of hiring a low-potential candidate who already has the needed skills will result in better long-term outcomes for your business in most every case.
4. Identifying potential issues early.
Assessments can also help you identify candidates who might be great for the job but have a very different work style than their future manager. In such cases, it may make sense to do additional interviews to see how the candidate and manager get along, or it may make sense to hire the candidate to a different department. Whatever the case, information is power, and having it upfront will only make the hiring process smoother.
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