- RESOURCE -
Hire Qualified Candidates
with effective testing and verification
In today’s competitive hiring market, your team likely wants to speed up the hiring process 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 testing and verification.
In this resource, we’ll walk you through the benefits of effective candidate testing and verification – and how you can streamline steps along the way.
Candidate Testing
Prescreen Surveys
A pre-screen survey is an important tool to help automate the applicant review process. Once candidates submit applications, prescreen 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 he or she isn’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.
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.
Skills Tests
Applicants aren’t always truthful on their resumes. An applicant might say he or she is 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.
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.
Background Checks
Your business needs to hire trustworthy employees who can offer top-notch customer service and drive revenue, so background checks are a critical final step in the hiring practice. Background checks should come back clean, instilling confidence in your decision to hire.
If any red flags show up on a background check – such as a suspended driver’s license for a candidate applying to a role that requires driving – this will be a clear sign you should move forward with another candidate who has a clean record. An accurate background check report will provide peace of mind that each prospective employee has a history free from negligence or other activities that may put your customers – and business – at risk.
Background checks can be automated with the right hiring process in place – and this can be made possible by partnering with a recruitment CRM platform like Hireology. To automate the process, candidates can submit the required personal information and the rest of the process is taken care of automatically. Hireology’s platform helps you select the required background checks and obtains candidate authorization. It also emails candidates if they need to take any action, and you’ll be notified as well to simplify the entire process. This leads to timely turnaround of applicant screening results, eliminates errors and ensures each new hire can be fully vetted before you extend an offer.
Reference Checks
Up to 85 percent of job applicants lie on their resumes. This is why your team needs to complete reference checks to verify each candidate’s previous work experience. Many employers make the mistake of skipping this step because it can be frustrating and time consuming – hiring or HR managers often end up playing phone tag with references, which takes time on their end and causing the hiring process to drag on for too long. And given today’s competitive hiring market, some employers might think they’ll lose candidates to other opportunities while waiting to hear back from reference.
By partnering with a recruitment CRM platform like Hireology, your team can automated reference checks, making both your job and the candidate experience more streamlined. Candidates simply provide their reference contact information and surveys are automatically sent to each contact, saving time that would have otherwise been spent scheduling and completing calls. And once you hear back from references, you can rest assured knowing candidates have the experience they’ve outlined in their resumes or during the interview process.
Automating candidate screening steps like hiring and background checks can help your team cut down time to hire significantly and secure top talent before the competition.
Are you interested in learning more about effective candidate testing and verification can help you secure qualified candidates for your open roles? Hireology is here to help – see a demo today.