Pre-employment Testing Today and Tomorrow

Pre-employment testing is essential to ensuring that you have a capable, resourceful workforce that can pull off any tasks required during their time in the company. If you accept an employee before first assessing their abilities, there’s a good chance that you will end up with an incompetent worker – a surefire way for the company to lose money. When it comes to employees, you want to ensure that you are getting the best you can.

This can only be done efficiently by constructing a test capable of gauging an employee’s abilities correctly so that you and everybody else at the company know what they can expect from the employee and (possibly even more important) what they cannot expect. Creating such a test can be hard work, and for years people have relied on the good old, tried, pen-and-paper approach; the applicant would get a piece of paper with a list of various questions and queries that they needed to answer to the best of their ability, and then wait a while for the tests to go through the long and tedious process of manual evaluation.

This approach is tried and works to an extent, but nowadays, thanks to the advent of modern technology, people are coming up with better and more efficient solutions for testing in the form of testing software. In this article, we want to discuss what you can gain from switching to a pre-employment testing software solution such as GetCertified, and why it’s a step up from the conventional testing method.

Time Efficiency

Testing is a process that involves gathering and processing a lot of information – not only do you have to evaluate the tests themselves, but there is also the employee’s CV and background to consider. If you have many applicants, this can be very tedious and take a long time as long as you use the manual approach. Every paper must be looked at separately and read with complete focus, which can be tiring and inefficient if a human has to perform this task. However, it’s entirely different if you use employee training software to aid you in this endeavor.

Modern computers can perform billions of operations in a single second, which means that it takes milliseconds for them to grade and evaluate a 50-question test, which is instant. This means that the number of applicants is no longer a factor, so you don’t have to limit yourself in that fashion – anyone can take the test, and only those deemed competent by the software will be allowed to pass.

Absolute Objectivity

Another problem with the manual evaluation of pre-employment tests is humans’ tendency to be biased. Objectivity has long been a problem with tests, not only in pre-employment testing but virtually in any situation where one has to take a test. It doesn’t matter how much we pride ourselves on objectivity; even if the tests are entirely random, we are still subject to a certain amount of bias. A computer program is another story entirely, as it functions based on logic alone and is incapable of being subjective. This is a surefire way to ensure that the results you get from your employees are genuinely a precise evaluation of their abilities, so you know what they’re capable of and how they can benefit the company.

Superior Reliability

Apart from the ability to be objective, humans are also not that good at performing repetitive tasks with equal focus over long periods. This is why many accidents on assembly lines or in any other field require people to spend their time doing tedious tasks, and it’s even worse when those tasks, apart from being repetitive, also require a great deal of focus at all times. A test is a perfect example of this because the questions are always the same, but the answers are slightly different. And after grading fifty or a hundred tests, one tends to lose focus, which can lead to mistakes in the evaluation process, making it less precise. A program doesn’t get fatigued in this manner, so it’s the perfect replacement for the human mind for such a task. It will stick to its given algorithm 100 percent of the time, no matter how many tests it evaluates, and this is priceless when you want to get precise information from the testing material.

Convenience

Finally, it’s important to mention how pre-employment testing software can make the entire evaluation process much more convenient for both the tester and the tested. Applicants can perform tests from the comfort of their owners, and all you have to do is send them a link via email, and they can get to work immediately. This is a massive step from the conventional approach, where all applicants must simultaneously be in the same room. By using software-based solutions, they can perform the test at their leisure, and as soon as they’re done, you instantly get their results and can contact them regarding the additional steps they need to take. It’s not only a great way to speed up the process, but it makes it far more flexible as well.

Summary

There are many more advantages that you can gain from using a software-based pre-employment testing solution, but we think that these four are sufficient for now. Pen-and-paper has been around for a long time and has served us well, but its time is definitely at an end. Automated testing is the future, and if this type of software keeps evolving, it will be the only logical choice sooner or later.