Pre-employment Screening Or Hiring Assessments; Is One A Better Tool Than The Other For Staffing Your Business? Part 2

Pre-employment Screening-  4                                                                                                WC Blog 429
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Pre-employment Screening Or Hiring Assessments; Is One A Better Tool Than The Other For Staffing Your Business? Part 2

     In Part 1 of this article I spent some time discussing how hiring assessments can be detrimental to an employer in terms of the limiting effect it can have on a hiring pool. These assessments are often a hundred questions or more and can take an hour or so of a job applicant’s time. I related in part 1 my personal experience of taking an assessment for a department manager position and failing it despite my extensive management and retail background. It was also irritating to fail this assessment since I know many of the questions involved integrity issues and handling difficult situations or theft related incidents. Cover your ears, I’m about to shout…I WAS A RETAIL LOSS PREVENTION MANAGER FOR 13 YEARS AND HAD 17 YEARS OR MORE OF TOTAL LOSS PREVENTION EXPERIENCE, FOR CRYING OUT LOUD! Shouting over, you can uncover your ears. You don’t handle many more integrity or theft situations than I have over my lifetime. To top it off, I figured out what the test was wanting, tested for a sales associate job for the same company and scored a 100% on the same day. The questions were generally the same so it was a flawed system, in my humble opinion. Using a background check company is a better way to assess whether an applicant would be a good member of your team than using one of these assessments.

     A background check company conducts pre-employment screening for employers and looks at the background and history of someone applying to a business. These checks can be customized to the needs of a particular company so that pertinent information on a candidate can be more carefully scrutinized. A long-haul truck company may be more interested in an applicant’s driver history and training schools attended than his/her credit history. A school will be more concerned with a thorough check of sex offender registries than they will be of a driver history. All employers may want to know that their employees have proper I9 credentials to ensure their workers are working legally in the United States. Based on the position search criteria may be even more stringent. The depth and intensity of the checks can be determined by the background check company and the business. The important thing to know is that you can learn a lot more about who an applicant is through pre-employment screening than through a test/assessment that may not give a true picture of the person you are considering for the job.

     Aside from my own experience I also want to share the story of another person who has been affected by one of these assessments. I met a homeless man and had a conversation with him. During the course of our conversation, I asked whether he had applied to a store nearby where I knew they were hiring and have a need for hard working, freight team members. The gentleman said he had applied and even had an interview but had failed the company’s assessment so they couldn’t hire him. I was furious. Not only was this man not out panhandling or asking for handouts, he was trying to apply for work and was turned down because of one of these STUPID assessments. And while he may have been telling me a story I don’t believe he was because I have failed one and I have a college degree and over 34 years of work experience. 

     I do not know this guy any more than I know the men who traveled to the moon. What I do know is had the business he applied to relied on a background check company to run a pre-employment screening in lieu of an assessment, he may have had a chance to pass and get a job. It is possible this business lost an opportunity to hire one fantastic worker. I know there are those who will be naysayers and insist that hiring assessments are unbiased and give the best evaluation of a candidate’s personality. Hold that thought. According to an article on the website “workable” titled, “Pre-employment Testing: pros and cons” by Nikolleta Bika, October 11, 2016, she lists the positives of pre-employment testing but she also lists the negatives of testing including: testing can be discriminatory, they invite lies and tests assume unique people are made through molds.  https://resources.workable.com/tutorial/pre-employment-testing What I am trying to point out is testing is not necessarily going to give you the best candidates and you may cheat yourself out of a great employee. Use pre-employment screening and your interview process to get the best candidates for your team.
Get more information on pre-employment screening, contact us or call 1.770.426.0547 today.


     

In Part 1 of this article I spent some time discussing how hiring assessments can be detrimental to an employer in terms of the limiting effect it can have on a hiring pool. These assessments are often a hundred questions or more and can take an hour or so of a job applicant’s time. I related in part 1 my personal experience of taking an assessment for a department manager position and failing it despite my extensive management and retail background. It was also irritating to fail this assessment since I know many of the questions involved integrity issues and handling difficult situations or theft related incidents. Cover your ears, I’m about to shout…I WAS A RETAIL LOSS PREVENTION MANAGER FOR 13 YEARS AND HAD 17 YEARS OR MORE OF TOTAL LOSS PREVENTION EXPERIENCE, FOR CRYING OUT LOUD! Shouting over, you can uncover your ears. You don’t handle many more integrity or theft situations than I have over my lifetime. To top it off, I figured out what the test was wanting, tested for a sales associate job for the same company and scored a 100% on the same day. The questions were generally the same so it was a flawed system, in my humble opinion. Using a background check company is a better way to assess whether an applicant would be a good member of your team than using one of these assessments.
     

A background check company conducts pre-employment screening for employers and looks at the background and history of someone applying to a business. These checks can be customized to the needs of a particular company so that pertinent information on a candidate can be more carefully scrutinized. A long-haul truck company may be more interested in an applicant’s driver history and training schools attended than his/her credit history. A school will be more concerned with a thorough check of sex offender registries than they will be of a driver history. All employers may want to know that their employees have proper I9 credentials to ensure their workers are working legally in the United States. Based on the position search criteria may be even more stringent. The depth and intensity of the checks can be determined by the background check company and the business. The important thing to know is that you can learn a lot more about who an applicant is through pre-employment screening than through a test/assessment that may not give a true picture of the person you are considering for the job.
     

Aside from my own experience I also want to share the story of another person who has been affected by one of these assessments. I met a homeless man and had a conversation with him. During the course of our conversation, I asked whether he had applied to a store nearby where I knew they were hiring and have a need for hard working, freight team members. The gentleman said he had applied and even had an interview but had failed the company’s assessment so they couldn’t hire him. I was furious. Not only was this man not out panhandling or asking for handouts, he was trying to apply for work and was turned down because of one of these STUPID assessments. And while he may have been telling me a story I don’t believe he was because I have failed one and I have a college degree and over 34 years of work experience. 
     

I do not know this guy any more than I know the men who traveled to the moon. What I do know is had the business he applied to relied on a background check company to run a pre-employment screening in lieu of an assessment, he may have had a chance to pass and get a job. It is possible this business lost an opportunity to hire one fantastic worker. I know there are those who will be naysayers and insist that hiring assessments are unbiased and give the best evaluation of a candidate’s personality. Hold that thought. According to an article on the website “workable” titled, “Pre-employment Testing: pros and cons” by Nikolleta Bika, October 11, 2016, she lists the positives of pre-employment testing but she also lists the negatives of testing including: testing can be discriminatory, they invite lies and tests assume unique people are made through molds. https://resources.workable.com/tutorial/pre-employment-testing What I am trying to point out is testing is not necessarily going to give you the best candidates and you may cheat yourself out of a great employee. Use pre-employment screening and your interview process to get the best candidates for your team.

 

Get more information on pre-employment screening, contact us or call 1.770.426.0547 today.