Best Assessment Types for Effective Employee Selection

Hiring the right employees is crucial to increasing productivity and achieving long-term success. The issue is how we can determine if a potential employee can become an excellent employee.

This uncertainty encourages companies to develop recruitment strategies to attract qualified talent. Companies use different ways to find the best employees. And if you’re still using only interviews for your hiring process, this article is for you.

Pre-employment assessments can provide valuable insights into candidates’ abilities, skills, and personality characteristics. These benefits can help companies make the right recruitment decisions. In this article, Algobash will review several types of tests that companies commonly use in employee selection.

What are the different types of assessments used in employee selection?

Algobash, a job assessment provider, found that 5 types of tests are crucial for selecting potential employees.

But is testing really necessary? Pre-employment tests can have a significant impact on recruitment results so that companies recruit the right candidates.

A study shows that employees who pass pre-employment tests can increase sales by 20% compared to employees who are hired but do not pass the test.

Employers commonly use several types of tests in employee selection. Each type has different ways of working, functions, advantages, and disadvantages.

Types Of Pre-employment Assessments

1. Skills Assessment

The first type of assessment commonly used in employee selection is a skills assessment. A way to measure specific technical abilities needed for a job. 

They can take the form of knowledge tests, practical skills assessments, or project-based tasks. This test will assess candidates’ skill abilities. HR can determine whether they have skills that are relevant to the job they are applying for or not. 

For example, a candidate applies for a programmer position. Candidates will be assessed on their programming knowledge and abilities through coding tests, problem-solving tasks, and other job-related activities.

In addition, of course, there are many other examples of skills assessments. Employers will generally tailor skills tests to the skills required by the job position. For example, coding tests for IT positions, spreadsheet tests for analyst positions, sales, or other jobs that interact a lot with data, and other types of tests.

Benefits:

• Can help ensure that the candidates selected have the skills that match the job position.
• Can provide recruitment teams with an objective basis for selecting suitable employees.
• With the right tools, hard skill identification can be done faster.

Disadvantages:

• In some cases, these tests require participants to spend a lot of time.

2. Personality Test

The second common type of assessment applied in employee candidate selection is personality tests. A personality test is an assessment designed to measure the psychological aspects of a candidate.

In this test, candidates will answer a series of questions given by HR. However, their instructor may also assign them a challenge or activity that aims to reveal their psychological characteristics. 

The HR department can analyze the candidate’s test answers to see how well they match the company culture and job requirements.

Various types of personality tests, such as MBTI tests, cognitive tests, and others, can be used.

Benefits:

• Can provide valuable insights into the personality and motivations of a candidate or prospective employee.
• Can help employers predict how successful candidates will be in the long term in the role or position they are applying for.
• Vendors and providers of these types of tests are quite common and easily available to companies.

Disadvantages:

• A candidate’s mood or condition when taking the test can affect test results.
• Personality tests are on average quite expensive when using the wrong vendor.

3. Cognitive Test

Cognitive tests are assessments designed to test and evaluate the intellectual and problem-solving abilities of prospective employees. 

This test will help the HR department to measure the candidate’s ability to think logically. Most common topics are about numerical skills, verbal abilities, analyzing, and critical thinking.

Candidates will need to answer several questions or tasks to challenge their cognitive abilities. There will always be a time limit to see how they work under pressure.

If you need to hire someone for an analytics role, you can give them a math test. This will help you see how well they work with numbers and data.

Benefits:

• This test provides an objective measurement of the candidate’s cognitive abilities.
• Helps HRDs to identify which candidates have strong analytical skills.
• Helps HRDs to predict a candidate’s potential to handle complex tasks in the future at work.

Disadvantages:

• This test may not fully reflect the performance of the candidate.
• Some candidates may feel anxious while taking the test which may affect their results.

4. Situational Judgment Tests (SJT)

Have you ever heard of situational judgment tests or SJT? You can use this assessment in your company’s hiring process to find the best candidates. It is a helpful test method to consider.

A situational judgment test assesses a candidate’s decision-making skills in job-related scenarios. The test helps employers understand how well a candidate can handle different situations. It measures the candidate’s ability to make appropriate decisions in specific work-related contexts. Employers use the test to determine if the candidate is a good fit for the job they are applying for.

In the test, candidates face work situations related to the job they want. HR department will ask the candidate to provide the best response or response to the scenario options given.

This test evaluates a potential employee’s decision-making, problem-solving, and ability to make the right choices.

Benefits:

• Can measure how a candidate’s ability to deal with various work situations in real life.
• Can assess how a candidate’s decision-making and problem-solving skills.
• Can reduce the subjectivity of the recruitment team in evaluating candidates.

Disadvantages:

• Unable to record a person’s specific technical abilities

5. Work Simulation Test

The last type of assessment commonly applied to prospective employees is the work simulation test. This test method asks candidates to complete tasks similar to those they will face in their future jobs.

The hiring committee will provide the candidate with a series of scenarios or tasks that describe the actual job. The candidate will finish tasks to see how well they can do the job and test their skills. The results will show their ability to complete job tasks.

For example, if a candidate is applying for a designer position at a startup company, they will be given the task of creating a user interface for the startup’s website.

Benefits:

• Can help users provide a realistic assessment of a candidate’s skills and abilities as they relate to future employment.
• Can provide users with insights into how candidates perform.
• This can reduce the risk of hiring candidates who do not have the skills related to the job position.

Disadvantages:

• If done without proper assessment controls, candidates are prone to cheating.

Maximizing the Use of Assessments: Where and How?

You can avoid the drawbacks of every type of assessment by using an online assessment platform.

Unfortunately, Indonesian assessment providers mostly provide specific types of assessments and cannot accommodate all the assessment needs above. If you want to use all these assessments, you will need to invest a lot of money.

But Algobash can help you to implement all types of assessments above, even added with the AI Interview feature!

Companies can use a single vendor for five different types of assessments. These assessments can evaluate candidates in areas such as skills, personality, suitability, and performance.

This allows companies to quickly and accurately assess potential candidates.