Pre-Employment Testing Today and Tomorrow
Pre-employment testing is an essential part of making sure that you have a capable, resourceful workforce that can pull off any tasks that are required of them during their time in the company. If you just accept an employee before first assessing their abilities, there’s a good chance that you are going to end up with an incompetent worker – a sure-fire way for the company to lose money. When it comes to employees, you definitely want to make sure that you are getting the best that you can.
Obviously, this can only be efficiently done by constructing a test that is capable of gauging an employee’s abilities properly, 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 it 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 method of testing.
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 a large number of applicants, this can be very tedious and take a really long time as long as you’re using the manual approach. Every paper has to be looked at separately and read with maximum focus, which can be both tiring and inefficient if a human has to perform this task. If you use employee training software to aid you in this endeavor, however, it’s a completely different story.
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 basically 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 who are deemed competent enough by the software will be allowed to pass.
Absolute Objectivity
Another problem with the manual evaluation of pre-employment tests is us humans’ natural tendency to be biased. Objectivity has long been a problem with tests, not only in the realm of 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 completely 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 in any way. This is a sure-fire way to make sure that the results you get from your employees are truly a precise evaluation of their abilities, so you perfectly 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 really that good at performing repetitive tasks with equal focus over long periods of time. This is why there are lots of accidents on assembly lines or in any other field that requires 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 every time. And after grading fifty or a hundred tests, one really tends to lose their focus and this can lead to mistakes in the evaluation process itself, 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 own homes, and all you have to do is send them a link via email and they can get to work right away. This is a huge step up from the conventional approach where all the applicants have to be in the same room at the same time. By using software-based solutions, they can simply 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 a long time and it has served us well, but its time is at definitely at an end. Automated testing is the future, and if this type of software keeps evolving, sooner or later it’s going to be the only logical choice.
