A pre-employment assessment helps the recruiter to make an informed hiring decision. It portrays the real picture of the candidates and allows recruiters to judge them beyond their wordy resumes.

Pre-hire assignments are good, but it is a time-consuming process. According to HR Drive, more than 47% of candidates say that they didn’t like the pre-employment assessments because the process took too long. However, most candidates know the importance of these pre-employment assessments, allowing them to find the right company of their choice.

Take home assessments which highlight the actual skills of a candidate are growing in popularity worldwide. But they are also appearing as ways for candidates from non-traditional backgrounds to showcase their skills. Hence, a clear pre-hire assessment may be a key part of a positive candidate experience, and every organization must consider it as their top priority.

It’s Insulting

9 out of 10 candidates lie in their resumes, and hiring a candidate based on their wordy resume is never good. One bad hire can negatively impact the business’s overall productivity and even cost a lot. That’s the reason why pre-employment tests are conducted.

But most candidates consider it as an ‘insult.’ They think that recruiters don’t trust their potential employees and ask to go through an intelligence test. Indicating to a potential employee that you don’t trust them is not a great way to build a relationship. And this is why most candidates step out of the recruiting process when they hear the term “assessment.”

It’s A Bad First Impression

As we have mentioned in the above point, it doesn’t create a great impression when your first interaction with your potential candidates tells them that you’ve to go through a pre-employment test. It implies that you don’t trust their resume, and they’re not worth your time.

We are living in a digital world – and automation is a must in the hiring process. But automation is a time-consuming task and requires many resources that most startups don’t have.

When you give your candidates an assessment before communicating with them, you indicate that your time is more valuable than theirs. This is the reason why candidates often hesitate to give assignment.

Candidates Consider These Tests As ‘Irrelevant’

One of the most prominent reasons why candidates hate a pre-employment assessment is that recruiters ask irrelevant questions. Most recruiters often make mistakes while setting up a pre-employment test for candidates by adding irrelevant questions which don’t match their job role. For example, they ask web development questions for the position of Android developers.

As a result, it makes the candidate step out of the recruiting process, and recruiters lose out on many opportunities to attract the right talent.

Some Recruiters Set Up A Very Difficult Test

The other reason why candidates hate pre-employment assessments is that recruiters set up difficult assessments. As a recruiter, remember to conduct an assessment that helps you eliminate unqualified candidates.

While setting up the test, you should also remember that it is one thing to solve the test questions at ease and a completely different experience when solving the same question in a stressful, time-boxed setup.

Pre-Employment Tests Makes The Hiring Process Lengthy And Complex

It’s true – pre-employment tests make the hiring process longer resulting in candidates stepping out of the recruitment process.

Ideally, the pre-employment tests should not exceed 60 mins to make sure that candidates can do it ASAP. They have less time to showcase their skills and experience. Even if you’re hiring a technical team, it is crucial to use a shorter assessment that proves that the candidate can write code sufficient to filter more than 70% of the candidates.

Once you have shortlisted the qualified candidates, you should do a more thorough analysis of who is the right fit for your culture by conducting interviews.

Recruiters Use A Complex Pre-Employment Assessment Tool

We live in a world full of technologies, and most recruiters use complex tools to conduct a pre-employment test. While you have conducted hundreds of tests, not every candidate is familiar with such technologies.

Most recruiters use a complex tool that candidates find difficult to operate. So, to improve candidate experience and streamline the recruiting process, you must use a tool that is easy to use for both parties to make things work smoothly.

You can leverage the power of Intervue, the most preferred pre-employment assessment tool by recruiters. It has an easy-to-use interface and will give you a clear insight into a candidate’s technical skills (in case of technical hiring). Using such tools will not only help you improve candidate experience but also streamline the recruiting process.

Is It Essential To Conduct A Pre-Employment Assessment?

Pre-employment assessments can help recruiters attract high-quality candidates. But here are some of the essential points which you must consider before conducting pre-employment tests:

• Avoid Legal Risk – Using discriminatory language can negatively impact your business’s reputation. So, it’s essential not to use it in the pre-employment assessments.
• Tests Should Be Relevant – The questions you ask must be related to the job profile you’re hiring. Asking irrelevant questions can result in candidates stepping out of the recruitment process.
• Tests Should Be Well-Validated – As per some laws, companies are not allowed to conduct tests devised on the spot by recruiting managers (as long as they are not discriminatory).

Conducting a well-structured and streamlined pre-employment test can help you assess the candidate’s skills, resulting in saving your time in interviewing unqualified candidates.

No candidate will ever prefer to go through a long cycle of interview rounds, such as pre-employment assessments. As a recruiter, you have to make your assessments more engaging and valuable for candidates.

Some candidates are serious about their careers, and they understand the importance of such assessments. To land their preferred job, they can go through all the stages of the recruiting process.

That said, keeping in mind why candidates hate pre-employment tests will help you make your recruiting process more engaging and valuable, resulting in attracting the right talent for your organization.