Imagine how it feels to win the lottery. You’re elated that, with a little luck, you hit the jackpot. Many people view the hiring process in the same way—as a gamble. Hiring managers do their best to pre-screen candidates and then go with their gut, selecting the person they feel is best for the job. Fortunately, there’s a way to stack the odds in your favor when it comes to hiring the right person for a job: assessments.
For most companies, using assessments to screen new hires isn’t a new tactic, but few are getting the most out of this human resources technology. Partnering with a staffing firm assessment expert can help you maximize this tool in a way that’s best suited to your hiring needs. With screening tools built to assess skill and personality fit, hiring managers don’t need to settle for a one-sided selection process anymore.
In the banking industry, where it’s critical to find people with the right set of skills and personality traits, assessments can go a long way in preventing hiring errors. Test results provide powerful information that helps a manager make a better hiring decision. This saves a company a lot of money and saves a whole department from the stress associated with hiring someone who isn’t a good fit.
Take the position of bank teller, for example. Hiring the right person ensures customers receive superior service and the department itself runs smoothly. A staffing firm’s suite of assessment services may include tests developed specifically for bank teller candidates that help identify people who can accurately count cash, verify customer information on checks and forms, and solve problems. By individually evaluating the skills necessary for a particular job, the staffing firm can advise which of these tests are most relevant for candidates to complete, manage the test-taking process, and provide an analysis of candidates’ test results to the hiring manager. Once the information is in hand, the selection process is left to the hiring manager.
But uncovering a candidate’s technical abilities to perform job duties is just one step in matching a candidate with an assignment. Exceptional employees also possess qualities and individual traits that really make them valuable to a specific department and the company as a whole. Personality tests are excellent tools that truly help portend a candidate’s success in a certain role.
While skills assessments are important, learning about a candidate’s behavioral traits provides the full spectrum of information necessary to make the hiring decision. Perhaps it’s important that the new hire possess self-control and sociability, an analytical thinking style, and a competitive nature. Hiring someone with these personality traits who needs skills training might be better than hiring someone who has competency but lacks the right traits. It’s much easier to provide skills training than adjust someone’s personality.
This isn’t to say pre-hire testing removes the challenge of hiring the right people; no amount of testing or prescreening can do that. But when paired with skilled interviewers, pre-hire assessments can provide a helpful leg up in hiring the best person for the job. IBI