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What is Pre-Employment Testing Software?
To streamline the recruitment process, many businesses, hiring managers, recruiters, and HR personnel turn to pre-employment testing software. These solutions screen candidates for essential hard and soft skills.
Key Benefits of Pre-Employment Testing Software
- Quickly assess and identify qualified talent
- Range of testing options, including personality, aptitude, work, and soft skills
- Integrations with applicant tracking systems (ATS)
Why Use Pre-Employment Testing Software?
Pre-employment testing solutions provide employers, HR personnel, and hiring managers with a tool to assess whether candidates fit within the company, department, team, and role. Building a qualified talent pool takes a lot of time and resources, and these testing solutions help streamline the process. Tests can be created to test candidates for skills based on role, as well as testing for soft skills to determine how they might perform within the team and department.
Who Uses Pre-Employment Testing Software?
Companies of all sizes benefit from implementing pre-employment testing solutions. Not only can they help mid- to large-size companies streamline the process of large applicant recruitment, they can help small companies focus on the skills that they need in a candidate to be most successful in their new role.
Kinds of Pre-Employment Testing Software
Pre-employment testing technology ranges from specific job-related skills testing to screening candidates for personality, aptitude, organization, and soft skills (communication, problem solving, motivation, and more).
Personality tests — Pre-employment personality tests measure the traits associated with the performance of specific roles. Individual jobs require certain traits to be successful. These tests evaluate behavioral traits to help businesses, HR departments, and hiring managers determine if candidates possess the behavioral traits necessary to hit the ground running in the new role. Employers use different personality tests for different industries and roles. An HR department might implement extroversion-introversion tests to find qualified candidates for sales-based roles, while a police department might test applicants for mental health or psychopathology.
Integrity tests — Integrity, or honesty tests, are a style of personality tests. These are most commonly implemented in the retail or financial services industries where employees often have unsupervised access to merchandise and money.
Aptitude tests — Pre-employment aptitude tests measure criteria such as problem-solving, critical thinking, attention to detail, and ability to process, analyze, and use new data and information. These tests provide businesses, HR personnel, and hiring managers with insight into how candidates will perform in an open position.
Skills tests — These pre-employment tests provide employers with insight into the skill level of all candidates across math, verbal, or industry- and role-specific skills.
Soft skills tests — These tests may include testing candidates for work ethic, communication skills, problem-solving skills, adaptability, and more.
Pre-Employment Testing Software Features
Pre-employment testing software functionalities may include, but are not limited to, the following features:
Prebuilt test templates and skills challenges — Prebuilt standard skills test templates help HR managers and recruiters identify candidates with the relevant skills for the open position.
Customized tests — In addition to providing prebuilt test templates, some pre-employment testing solutions offer customizable tests and skills challenges.
Integrations — Pre-employment testing solutions might integrate with ATS solutions, email providers to automate emails, background screening, and more.
Built-in ATS — Some pre-employment testing solutions provide built-in ATS features to streamline the process of maintaining and screening the candidate pipeline.
Analytics — Dashboards share performance statistics. These solutions might also provide customized performance reports, comparative reports, advanced filtration and search, or shareable reports that help employers objectively rank candidates, as well as how well skills tests are performing.
Additional Pre-Employment Testing Features
Expert guidance — Some pre-employment testing solutions may provide dedicated experts to help HR professionals and hiring managers build job assessment workflows for the particular needs of the company or position.
Simulations — Some pre-employment testing solutions provide simulations of MS Office, chat, or multitasking, to name a few, so candidates do not need to download any programs to be tested for software skills.
Cheating prevention — Some pre-employment testing solutions provide webcam-based proctoring features as well as behavior detection to identify any possible cheating.
Potential Issues with Pre-Employment Testing Software
Testing for culture fit — These tools use data and analytics to determine whether a candidate shares traits with the team, department, and company. These solutions might also claim to be able to predict whether candidates will get along well with current team members. This feature seems well and good, but companies must be cognizant of their unconscious biases and work toward hiring for a culture add and not a culture fit. Testing candidates for their levels of likeness can result in removing qualified candidates from the talent pool that would improve diversity and expand thought, not just fall in line with the way of thinking that has already been established.
Legal concerns related to personality testing — Under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it is unlawful for an employer to refuse to hire or discriminate against any individual with respect to their compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment due to race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Title VII does not directly prohibit employers from using personality or integrity tests, however, employers must be aware that the statute is implicated when employers use tests to intentionally discriminate against minorities or the tests have an adverse impact on minorities and are not job-related for the position in question.
Race or gender discrimination — Personality tests that have race- or gender-specific norms might violate Section 106 of the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which makes it unlawful practice for an employer to “adjust the scores of, use different cutoffs for, or otherwise alter the results of employment related tests on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin." Some personality tests have been found to employ gender-specific norms, so employers should only use integrity tests with standard, non-gender-based norms.
Psychological tests as “medical examination" — According to U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) guidelines, employers can use psychological examinations providing the exam is not deemed “medical." Psychological tests are medical if they can identify mental disorders or impairment. Therefore, clinical-based personality tests designed to diagnose a mental disorder or impairment, for example depression or paranoia, should not be used to test candidates. Employers should stick to personality or integrity tests that focus on honesty and personality.
Privacy — Employment privacy is a growing concern as the right to privacy issue expands. Invasion-of-privacy claims often arm themselves with federal, state, and common law. Public employers must comply with the U.S. Constitution, and some states, such as California, have state legislation protecting the privacy of employees and candidates. Tests administered to any employees or candidates that are protected under federal or state laws must not be too intrusive and must be job-related. Ten states’ constitutions provide the right to privacy protections, and many of these are much broader than the federal legislation. Personality tests have most commonly been challenged on the grounds of invading a candidate’s or employee’s privacy. Integrity tests that test for honesty, however, have not been found to be as invasive because they dig less into a candidate’s personality.
Negligent hiring — There have been cases where an employer has needed to defend hiring an employee following an incident of theft or assault. The liability is put on the employer for having acted negligently during hiring by placing a candidate with propensities toward violence or theft in the workplace when they should have been identified and weeded out during the screening and testing phase of hiring. In this case, pre-employment testing provides evidence that an employer has taken the necessary precautions by testing all employees and their potential for causing harm.
