21 March 2025
The pros and cons of pre-employment testing
Employing the wrong person can be costly. Depending on which piece of research you read, that cost has been calculated at between one-and-a-half to three times a role’s annual salary. As such, for senior roles or for businesses hiring at scale, getting it wrong can have a serious impact on your bottom line.
For recruitment professionals and hiring managers, the goal is to create a fair and equitable process. This is important not only for legal compliance, but also to give candidates confidence in your process. This means putting your ‘gut feeling’ to one side and, as far as possible, eliminating bias and subjectivity. Whilst not always as foolproof as some of the marketing blurb might lead you to believe, the latest pre-employment screening tools can certainly help.
Whether you’re assessing personality, cognition, values or hard and soft skills, there are a plethora of increasingly sophisticated testing tools on the market that can help mitigate risk by improving the integrity of your recruitment process and the quality of your hires.
What are we testing for?
As well as bringing some objectivity to the process, competency testing offers a straightforward approach to screening, saving hiring managers time later in the process. Whatever the role, the first step is to verify that an individual possesses the core skills needed for the job.
Aptitude testing assesses a person’s cognitive ability. Testing comprehension, problem-solving and an individual’s capacity to learn are all good indicators of how a person will perform and develop in a role.
Recruiters often talk about cultural ‘fit’ but, perhaps, cultural ‘add’ is a more appropriate description of what organisations need, especially when they’re looking to appoint to more senior roles.
Rather than looking for homogeneity, we would suggest organisations should be testing for complementarity. Diversity and difference are, after all, the hallmarks of innovative, productive leadership teams.
Psychometrics are useful in this respect. They get under the skin of a person’s motivations, values, behaviours, and leadership style, all useful for understanding whether that person will fit within your high-performing team of complementary talent.
Entry-level/early career testing
55% of early career employees leave their jobs within the first year. This is because the reality of the role doesn’t meet their expectations.
In the early-career space, job-simulation approaches are a proven path to achieving a successful outcome, not just for hiring managers, to leverage predictive data on how a candidate will perform in post, but also for candidates themselves, to gain a more accurate understanding of the role they are applying for.
Large, volume, early-career in-house recruiters are addressing attrition rates by commissioning bespoke, day-in-the-life, skills-based, job-simulation assessments, to great effect. While usually not a cost-effective option for SMEs, there are a number of customisable, off-the-shelf solutions that deliver excellent results, instead.
The best tools save time by streamlining and standardising the volume screening process, enabling hiring managers to create customisable, realistic job simulations. They can be integrated within the organisation’s Applicant Tracking System (ATS) for a completely brandable, seamless, candidate experience, and delivered through a single platform for ease of use. They also integrate with GenZ mobile technologies and delivery formats, like video and chatbots, further enhancing the candidate experience.
A word of caution
Testing in not a solution in itself. While there is no doubt, today’s online testing tools are increasingly sophisticated, they are only a part of the process. Results can be ambiguous and open to interpretation. And while solution providers have anti-cheat features built-in, they can still be open to manipulation.
Where people are involved, nothing is completely neutral. And although user data helps refine each test over time, inevitably there will be elements of unconscious bias and even discrimination, whether in the questions themselves or in the way they are delivered.
For all the claims around sophisticated AI and customisation, testing is a ‘standardised’ and – depending on what sector you are in and what you are testing for – sometimes blunt tool. It is a numbers game, built around the responses of the neurotypical. As such, an over-reliance on any kind of digital screening process can run the risk of missing a neurodiverse gem of a talent, for example.
And, although helpful for you as a prospective employer, too much testing, as part of your process, may put some prospective candidates off, particularly the early career, Gen Z cohort of applicants.
Psychometrics and the neurodiverse
Organisations relying solely on technology to secure the best-fit candidates from a large talent pool often rely on psychometrics as part of the process. However, these tools can discriminate against the neurodiverse.
At least 20% of the UK's working population is neurodiverse. As such, we are missing out on large swathes of talent. Rather than focusing on fit, we need to focus on key strengths of an individual.
Companies championing neurodiversity enjoy up to 30% higher levels of innovation and reduce employee turnover by as much as 30-50%, according to a report from the National Institute of Economic and Social Research. Maximising this potential hinges on equitable recruitment tactics.
Abandon the uniform approach: Conventional psychometric tests don't adequately represent the strengths of neurodiverse individuals. Modifying evaluations to accommodate varied cognitive profiles can help.
Make accommodations: Talk openly with candidates about the accommodations they need. Research from the Harvard Business Review shows a 60% improvement in candidate satisfaction when you do.
Focus on strengths: Determine the indispensable skills each position demands. Refining assessments to measure these competencies specifically can highlight neurodiverse candidates with exceptional potential.
Mitigate risk and ensure ROI when hiring for senior roles
All that said, while the jury is out on the use of psychometrics in the early screening process, we are massive fans when testing individuals in the latter stages.
When used as part of a senior selection process, the latest, sophisticated online personality profiling and psychometric assessment tools can offer accurate and predictive insight into a candidate's values, motivations emotional intelligence, and interpersonal style.
This kind of profiling can be an invaluable interview aid for identifying strengths and probing areas for development. It is a proven approach that enables one to predict a prospective employee's ability to adapt and develop within an organisation, ensuring a cultural as well as technical-capabilities-based add.
Again, results are open to interpretation and best left to skilled HR practitioners who are trained to use these assessment and profiling solutions.
Assessment centres
When all your candidates look very similar on paper, assessment centres are among the most accurate predictors of who will be the best fit. A recommended solution for senior and executive roles, they work because they are bespoke, designed to be role- and organisation-specific. Not only do they offer a robust, equitable process but they also give the right candidate the opportunity to shine in specific scenarios relevant to the role itself.
For more on what they look like in practice read our case study on an Assessment Centre for a board recruitment campaign.
In brief
According to the Recruitment and recovery report | Recruitment and Employment Confederation | REC poor hiring decisions are costing the UK economy £7.7 billion annually in lost productivity. As part of a robust recruitment process, testing can give us the insight we need to make the right decisions.
Brandable and customisable, the latest online assessment tools help build your employer brand, standardising the process in a way that makes candidates feel confident that it is fair and equitable. Such a robust approach also helps mitigate the risk of any legal challenge on the grounds of the process being discriminatory.
By integrating these tools into your recruitment process, you will save time, money, and mitigate risk by making better hiring and employee lifecycle decisions.
However, sole reliance on 'standardised' testing, by its very nature, runs the risk of missing out on talent with very specific and exceptional skills. The bottom line is, when it comes to people, there is no such thing as 'normal'. Candidates are individuals and should be treated as such.
Face-to-face human interaction - and dare we say it, your 'gut feeling' - will always play an important part in the recruitment process. This needs to be combined with the more data-driven objectivity that the latest profiling and testing tools enable.
To read more about assessment and profiling, download our factsheet.
21 March 2025