In today’s competitive hiring market, your team likely wants to reduce time-to-hire as much as possible to secure top talent. But it’s critical to avoid cutting corners during the hiring process and ensure you’re only hiring candidates who are qualified and the right fit for your team. To achieve this, several steps of the hiring process should focus on candidate screening and verification.
In this first part of a two-part series, we’ll walk you through the benefits of two testing and verification hiring steps — prescreen surveys and skills tests.
Candidate screening
A prescreen survey is an important tool to help automate the applicant review process. Once candidates submit applications, pre-screen surveys enable you to immediately send automated follow-up emails thanking them for their interest and providing a link to the survey. Prescreen surveys consist of a series of true/false questions and only take candidates a few minutes to complete. And Hireology data found that 40 percent of applicants don’t even bother to complete the survey — meaning only the most engaged candidates who truly want to join your team take the time to fill out the survey.
Benefits of prescreen surveys include:
Tailor surveys to each role
Rather than sending the same prescreen survey to every candidate, you can tailor the specific questions to each role. For example, if a given role requires a specific certification or a driver’s license, you can include these as “knock out” questions in the prescreen survey. If the candidate doesn’t have the certification or a valid license, you’ll know they aren’t a fit for the open role. You can also ask questions related to availability — such as whether or not applicants are available to work nights or weekends, among other questions that can weed out applicants who don’t meet your requirements.
Only focus on qualified candidates
Hireology data found that the average business takes about 10 days to review and respond to job applicants, which can lead to losing qualified talent to competing job opportunities. Part of the reason HR and hiring manager often take more than a week to review applicants is that they end up spending too much time manually reviewing applicants who aren’t even a fit for open roles.
By including prescreen surveys in your hiring process, job seekers who don’t meet the basic requirements of the role can be automatically eliminated from the process before your team has to waste time reviewing their applications. While you’re saving this time, you can focus more on qualified applicants and other responsibilities that can help move the business forward.
Skills testing
Up to 85% of job applicants lie on their resumes. An applicant might say they are an expert at Excel or has extensive sales experience, but skills tests can help you ensure this is truly the case. Skills tests ultimately help you ensure candidates have the skills they list on their resumes or discuss in interviews — before you extend an offer.
Benefits of skills tests include:
Test for hard skills
The first type of skills test can help you gauge a candidate’s hard skills — meaning the technical skills a candidate needs to succeed in your open role. Using this type of skills testing, you might test on math comprehension, CNA requirements, service technician expertise, Microsoft Office skills, among other areas depending on the role.
No matter the position you’re looking to fill, you want to have confidence in knowing candidates are capable of performing the job well. Otherwise, you risk hiring someone who isn’t qualified and have to start the hiring process all over again to find a replacement.
Test for soft skills
Beyond hard skills, your team needs to gauge whether or not each candidate has the soft skills to succeed on your team. These skills are less technical, but necessary for most jobs, such as social etiquette, compassion, business vocabulary, or customer service capabilities.
Soft skills tests are an effective way to determine whether or not candidates have the right work habits to get the job done effectively. Based on the results, you can measure if candidates will fit with your team from a cultural perspective and offer a top-notch experience to customers. If you hire a candidate who doesn’t have the right soft skills, he or she might cause tension among your team or drive customers away.
Want to see how your verification and screening practices stack up against your competitors? Check out Hireology’s Future of Hiring Report today to get insight into the hiring practices of your peers.
Seamlessly screen candidates during the hiring process
If you don’t already have candidate screening and skills testing steps in place, the thought of implementing these hiring process steps can seem daunting. The best applicant tracking system for those that are unsure of how to add extra steps into your hiring process is likely to be one that directly integrates with prescreen surveys and skills tests.
Using Hireology, tailored prescreen surveys are automatically sent to job seekers as soon as they submit an application. Not only does this save time, but it can help your team support a more engaging candidate experience. By moving forward with the prescreen survey step of the hiring process immediately, candidates won’t have to wait around several days to hear about next steps.
When it comes to skills tests, Hireology has several available for specific roles, focusing on such areas as accounting, office administration, mathematics, certified nursing, auto parts and technicians expertise, IT networking, and many more. Each assessment can be completed by candidates within 15 minutes, and tests are automatically scored with the results sent directly to the hiring manager.
Are you interested in learning more about how integrated prescreen surveys and skills tests can help you build the best team at a time of historically-low unemployment? Hireology can help — take a platform tour to see it in action today. And stay tuned for part two of this series, which will focus on reference and background checks.
