Finding amply qualified candidates to fulfil a specific job description and skill set is not always the simple task. When you ask whether or not a candidate is proficient in a particular skill, you will most likely receive the answer you are looking for: yes. However, surveys have implicated that 1/3 of job candidates tell little white lies during the recruitment process. How do you know who has the best skills without testing them?
Decrease the Chances of “Bad Hires”
Skills testing plays a major role in hiring the perfect people for jobs which require proficiency in specific domains. It provides an objective, fair, and efficient method of comparison. A candidate can say that they are proficient in Microsoft Word, for instance, but once you have hired them, you may find out that they are not as skilled as they stated in the interview. By then, you have already hired them and, like anyone that does the hiring and firing in a company knows, it is extremely difficult to get rid of a bad hire.
On the other end, you might only need someone who has beginner skills to fill the position that you are hiring for. Skills testing will let you know at exactly which level the candidate currently sits. This way, you are not hiring someone who is proficient or advanced in a particular skill for a position that only requires basic skills – reducing the possibility that your new hire will become bored in their new position.
Using Skills Testing Early In the Hiring Process
You may find that you want to implement the skills testing early in the interview process to decrease the chances of losing great candidates to the competition. The employment market is tight and is comprised of plenty of qualified candidates. By sitting your top choice candidates at the beginning of the recruitment process, you will narrow your candidate pool quickly and reduce the amount of time that you would have otherwise spent interviewing unqualified candidates. In addition, you will be able to hire your choice candidate faster and with more confidence than you would without a skills assessment.
What a Bad Hire Will Cost You
The cost of hiring the wrong employee depend greatly on how large your business is, what level the particular job is on (management and executive level mistakes will cost more) and many other variables. The cost of hiring mistakes includes lost labour hours, including the hired employee’s hours, the manager’s hours, the trainer’s hours and the human resource’s department’s hours. The human resource department personnel are responsible for hiring a replacement, which is altogether a time-consuming and money-wasting process.
The Employment Management Association, a subsidiary of the Society for Human Resource Management, notes that the mean cost per direct hire for non-hourly workers is $10,500. This is just a starting point for the losses, because each employee, on average, is also said to generate over $1,000 for the company every day. This revenue is lost every single day that a position is not covered adequately. If the position is empty – or filled with an employee that cannot handle the job – the company will lose either a portion or all of the revenue that should be generated by the right employee for the job.
Skills testing will eliminate most of the hiring mistakes that occur within your company as well as make the hiring process easier and more streamlined for the HR department. It will also reduce the costs of finding the perfect placements for qualified candidates during the recruitment process and reduce the time that it takes to find the best people for the positions that need to be filled. Companies that currently use skills testing report that their human resource expenditures have lowered and their business profitability has improved. What company doesn’t want that?
For a comprehensive list of skills tests, visit here.
