Even though your products or services are at the core of your business, your employees are its lifeblood. Hiring the right team is crucial to running a successful business — great employees help you achieve goals, improve productivity, sales, and contribute to a better company culture.

On the other hand, a bad hire can be a costly mistake resulting in drained resources, a negative impact on productivity and performance, loss of revenue, and hindering of employee morale.

One of the top reasons businesses make bad hiring decisions is because they are more concerned with hiring quickly than well. While filling a staffing gap is important, especially in high-performing businesses, it’s more important to find the right fit.

Skill assessments are tests designed to help employers evaluate the skills of their job candidates and employees. Using skills assessments helps companies ensure that their candidates have the required skills to successfully perform their jobs.

They’re a great way to determine whether a candidate is a good match for the job position you are looking to fill, and are especially useful for handling high-volume hiring. When you are processing a large number of applicants, using a skills assessment as a pre-screening method can help you differentiate the top candidates early in the hiring process.

Best practice recruitment uses Skills assessments alongside Cognitive and Behavioural assessments to form the full picture of candidates. The ‘Can Do’ is Fluid Intelligence (ability to solve new problems, or ‘innate’ intelligence) and is measured by Cognitive Ability Assessments. The ‘Has Done’ is Crystallised Intelligence – knowledge, facts and skills, acquired from life experience, education and on-the-job learning and is best measured by Skills Assessments. Whereas the ‘Wants To’ refers to our personality; values, motivation and preferences for styles of working, measured by Behavioural Assessments.

By providing a piece of accurate, evidence-based information on candidates’ skills and knowledge, skills assessments are one of the best ways to eliminate bias in recruitment.

Unlike resumes and interviews which necessarily provide more detailed information on candidates which can be judged (even unconsciously!) by recruiters, skill assessments provide a more objective evaluation of candidates’ skills.

Using skills assessments can be both time and money-saving. By eliminating unqualified candidates early in the selection process, and thus saving hiring managers’ time, the hiring process becomes shorter and more effective and this results in less money being spent.

Money is also saved by avoiding the high cost of a bad hire and hiring only the best, most productive candidates. According to Career Builder, the average cost of a single bad hire is nearly $15,000.

In summary, utilising skills assessment tests helps companies hire the right people. As a result, companies can avoid the high cost of bad hires and ensure higher productivity of their employees, which positively affects the company’s bottom line.

In short, using skills assessment tests helps companies make well-informed decisions when it comes to hiring, training, and promoting their candidates and employees.

For more information on how to choose the right type of skill assessment test for you, get in touch with us at hello@testgrid.com