4 Reasons Why Hiring Assessments Are Vital During a Tight Labor Market

It’s no secret that we’re currently in a tight labor market. Our country’s unemployment rate is hovering near a 10-year low at 3.7%, and we continue to see job growth in nearly every industry every month. As Millennials become the largest generation in the labor market and more seasoned workers continue to retire, HR departments can no longer rely on recruiting and best practices that worked well just a few years ago.

“Best practices” is a term that gets thrown around quite a bit during these uncertain times, but in order to adapt to today’s changing workforce needs, it’s not enough to just talk the talk. HR departments and recruiters need to take concrete, creative steps to secure talent during these times when the top talent is already taken and your high potentials may be poached by a higher-paying competitor.

Examine Your Selection Life Cycle

Your best first step is to pull back and examine your selection life cycle from a bird’s-eye view. Write down every single step that a candidate goes through—from finding your open job to starting his or her first shift—and note the turnaround times for each step.

Next, map this onto your applicant tracking system data. Can you find relationships between candidate fallout and long gaps in your timing? If so, reevaluate the timing, necessity, and efficiency of these steps. Ensuring your screenings are conducted at the right time during the hiring process narrows the funnel and allows you to find the best person for the job, rather than just a warm body.

Once you’ve critically analyzed the efficiency of each step, you should revisit the effectiveness, as well. Do you understand why your process functions the way it does? Or are you just operating on autopilot? Below are steps for HR departments and recruiters to take at four stages of the selection process when dealing with a competitive labor market.

1. Screening assessments at the beginning of your process—right after a résumé review or a short phone screen—ensure you’re only assessing candidates who have met the minimum qualifications of the job. Even during a tight labor market, you should be screening out 5%–10% of your applicant pool from the top of the funnel. This helps weed out people who may be a safety, turnover, dependability, or quality risk to your organization. After all, even when talent is tight, there’s no point in hiring someone who has had five jobs in the past year—he or she will be out the door again before you know it.
2. In-depth assessments are sometimes seen as the easiest activity to put on the chopping block during a tight labor market, but we strongly recommend against that. Assessments that measure various aspects of personality and cognitive ability, as well as cultural fit, can be crucial when your talent pool is restricted. After all, one of the most common reasons that people stay at an organization is the people they work with. The more new hires who are a poor fit from a cultural or quality perspective, the less likely your current workforce will want to stick around. After all, in a tight labor market, your best workers can afford to leave.
3. Interviews are still assessments, even if most employers don’t necessarily think of them in that way. During a tight labor market, interviews are often not eliminated but rather reduced to a 10- to 15-minute rushed conversation in which general impressions are used to determine pass/fail status. If this sounds familiar, consider moving to an online interview: New technology allows candidates to record their answers at their convenience, making it much more likely that they’ll follow through with this step. If this isn’t feasible, then use that brief time to focus on motivational fit instead of rushing through a laundry list of résumé-type questions. This’ll give you the best idea of how your candidate’s natural interests and passions align with the job.
4. Realistic job previews are an important part of the hiring process, especially for any job that has unique or generally unfavorable physical, environmental, or scheduling components. Candidates can assure you they have no issues with working in extreme temperatures or being able to lift 50 pounds regularly, but a realistic job preview forces candidates to experience, at least to some extent, what it is they will be doing on a daily basis. If you have an on-site component to your selection system, you can easily incorporate this realistic job preview by simply having the candidates walk through the building with you on their way to the interview, assessment, or physical. It hardly adds any time but can have a lasting impression.

Assessments can create extra steps in a hiring process, which may make some organizations hesitant to implement them if the pressure to fill positions is heavy. However, the worst that can happen during the process is you lose the candidate, but it’s much better for your organization to lose a candidate in the hiring process than after you’ve spent endless hours, and ultimately dollars, on training and onboarding.

Jaclyn Menendez, PhD, is a Senior Consultant at PSI based out of Fort Collins, Colorado. Her areas of expertise include testing, assessments, and project management. Menendez has contributed to the development, validation, and implementation of assessments with various clients. She has managed, analyzed, and presented data analyses for content and criterion validation studies. Connect with PSI on Twitter: @PSIServicesLLC.