About a pre-hire assessment
Employment testing is not a new concept. Since industrialization, organizations across Europe and worldwide have looked for reliable ways to select the right people. A pre hire assessment is an online assessment used before hiring to objectively measure personality, cognitive ability, skills, and job related competencies. This data driven approach helps organizations make better hiring decisions by reducing bias and increasing predictive accuracy.
With modern pre hire assessment tools, employers can go beyond CVs and interviews and gain structured insight into how candidates think, behave, and perform. An online assessment makes this process scalable, cost effective, and easy to apply across locations and roles. As a result, organizations improve quality of hire, reduce mismatch, and build stronger teams based on evidence rather than intuition.
Generally, these tools fall under various categories:
- Personality testing - Its purpose is to reveal a candidate’s characteristics like interpersonal relations, emotional adjustment, attitude, motivation, and interests. This is important because the nature of the business that different organizations conduct requires different types of personalities.
- Integrity testing – The test is used to determine whether a candidate is likely to engage in undesirable behavior such as abuse of drugs, stealing, or lying. Candidates respond to direct questions that gauge honesty.
- Aptitude testing – An aptitude test measures your candidate’s skills or their ability to excel when assigned a particular role. The test is designed with the assumption that each person carries possesses strengths and weaknesses. It also assumes that they can either succeed or fail in certain areas based on their innate traits.
- Cognitive testing
– These tests are designed to determine whether your candidates have any issue with cognitive skills such as verbal reasoning, attention to detail, problem-solving, reading comprehension, and numerical reasoning.
How to determine the right test to use?
If you plan on implementing pre-hire assessment testing, it is important that you make the right decision about which test(s) to use. You need to choose a test that measures required knowledge, skills, abilities, and other traits, also called KSAOs.
- Knowledge determines the information that potential candidates have. For instance, it could be knowledge of accounting principles.
- Skills are focused on the behaviors that candidates require to execute their roles. Some examples of skills that employers mainly look for include time management and oral communication.
- Abilities have to do with traits that you can observe and that are required to execute the physical requirements of particular jobs. For example, lifting and climbing stairs.
- Other traits may encompass crucial characteristics like reliability and employee attitude.
By considering the KSAOs, you are able to isolate the specific requirements of a role and translate them into a structured pre hire assessment. This approach ensures that you measure what truly matters for success on the job, rather than relying on general impressions. For example, a 4 color personality test can be used to gain insight into communication styles, motivation, and team dynamics. An assessment for managers helps evaluate leadership potential, decision making, and the ability to guide teams effectively. By aligning the assessment tools with the KSAOs, you create a more objective and predictive selection process. As a result, you increase the quality of hiring decisions and reduce the risk of a mismatch between candidate and role.
What next? Chose your pre-hire assessment
A rre-hire assessment does not have to be a tedious and complicated process. On the contrary, you need to use a tool that makes your work easier while at the same time directing you to the right candidate. Get started today with The Bridge Personality and The Bridge Ability Suite to streamline your hiring process.
