Research indicates that 85% of job applicants lie on their résumés and job applications because employer application tracking systems expect exact matches from their applicant pools. So, applicants are getting smarter and tweaking their résumés to make it through these technological hurdles and to the first round of interviews.
allanswart / iStock / Getty Images Plus
And according to research by Monster, one of the top three things that jobseekers are lying about on their résumés and applications is their skill set—which is one of the main reasons why you should strongly consider requiring preemployment knowledge-based tests.
Keep reading to learn more about the benefits and advantages of requiring preemployment knowledge-based tests for your organization’s job applicants.
More Efficient Hiring Processes
The Internet and recruiting tools have made it very easy and much less time-consuming for interested parties to submit job applications for any position they want to online, even if they aren’t necessarily qualified.
So, you’re likely to receive hundreds of job applications per job announcement, with many unqualified or under-qualified applicants included in the mix. When you mention in your job announcements that you’ll require a preemployment knowledge-based skills assessment, however, you are much more likely to weed out unqualified job applicants.
And then, once you narrow down your pool of applicants to a dozen prospects or fewer, you can have them complete knowledge-based assessments to see which top five applicants are most qualified to interview. So overall, preemployment knowledge-based tests will make your hiring process run more efficiently and quickly.
Better Assembly of Teams and Departments
As you’re considering different candidates for different positions across your organization, you can use their skills-based assessments to see where they would fit in best at your organization before you ever make an official job offer to make sure your organization needs their particular strengths. And you can use their scores and assessment results to see where they would fit in best.
For example, if you’re hiring two different data analysts for different departments and one candidate exhibits strong data visualization skills and the others don’t, you would want to place him or her with the department that has a team that is strongly lacking and needing those particular skills from its data analyst so that the new data analyst could fill that need.
Reduction in Employee Turnover, Absenteeism Rates, and Costs
When employees do jobs that they’re truly qualified for, they’re much less likely to leave your organization or perceivably slack on the job, as they will never feel as if they’re being asked to do something that is outside of the realm of their abilities.
What’s more, when organizations require preemployment knowledge-based assessments, they won’t have to worry about spending a lot of time and money hiring someone who doesn’t know how to do what he or she claimed he or she knew how to do on the application—which will only lead to the termination of the new hire a few months later after they discover that their new hire can’t perform the fundamental requirements of the job for which he or she was hired anyway.
To maintain a more efficient hiring process and better-organized teams, as well as reduce costs associated with some employee turnover and absenteeism, consider requiring preemployment knowledge-based tests for all applicants.