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Common Pre-employment Test
Ask a top executive how they built the biggest businesses of today and they’ll likely give you some variation of a commonplace adage: “A company is only as successful as the people it employs.” Common Pre-employment Test
Push them a little further and they’ll probably start talking about culture, and the importance of trying to foster a high performing, ‘winning culture’ in the workplace. When Michael Dell – Founder and CEO of Dell Technologies – was asked why competitors haven’t been able to compete with Dell’s rather straightforward, seemingly replicable business model, his response was accordingly curt, “Culture plays a huge role.”
How to Enhance Company Culture
A company’s culture is the guiding light that beams through the whole organization, leading employees through the entire decision-making process. A company must be able to define it, and its staff must be able to live it. When this happens, employees of companies with the best cultures, as this Baines and Company study put it, “Not only know what they should do, but they know why they should do it.”
So if staff and culture are so important, how do employers make sure their new starters are going to share their values?
It requires the employment process to dig a little deeper than traditional sources, to look in a place that goes beyond the CV or the interview room—a place where your innermost characteristics reside: the mind. That’s where psychometric testing becomes useful.
This form of pre-employment testing can be very tough to pass and can help engrave a sense of strong company culture early on.
The Importance of Psychometric Testing
The most lucrative jobs will always attract the smartest, most qualified applicants.
Imagine it: Amazon posts a job ad for a graduate software developer, and within a couple of days (hours even) they’ve got an Everest-like stack of proposals from the highest performing graduates, fresh from the world’s leading universities.
They’ve all got top grades; they all have relevant work placement experience; they all look highly employable. The difficult part isn’t attracting the best talent, it’s decanting that stack into a handful of people that are going to adapt to the culture and drive the business forward.
For employers in the UK and US that use psychometric testing, it’s more than likely they’re using the SHL test, the industry-leading provider of pre-employment aptitude testing worldwide.
Microsoft is one of their many clients and they say they use SHL tests as a way of evaluating graduates that helps lighten the workload of their internal HR teams.
The SHL mantra is simple and they’ve branded themselves with a succinct precision: “We provide deep people insights to predict and drive workplace performance”.
The Different Types of SHL Tests
You can think about the outreach of SHL testing on two different levels and categorize their assessments as such.
The first group is a test of cognitive ability, revealing a candidate’s competence in solving complex problems and showcasing their capacity for logic and reason. These tests might be called ‘Numerical Reasoning’, ‘Mechanical Reasoning’ or ‘Verbal Reasoning’.
They’re often multiple-choice items and will give an employer an idea of a candidate’s numerical and verbal ability—there are right and wrong answers here, and the higher you score the better. Linking this with the bigger picture, a high-performance work culture also relies on two fundamental assets.
The first is assembling a group of smart, highly skilled individuals to make up the team, and the second is curating a very distinct voice or personality, built on through shared values, that said team then embodies.
Numerical reasoning and verbal reasoning tests are great for identifying the former—the most intelligent, skilled individuals.
The second group of tests is described by SHL as ‘behavioral’ or ‘personality’ assessments, and they help refine these most intelligent candidates into an even smaller group. A group of those who are most likely to behave in a way that will allow the company culture to flourish and expand.
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Behavioral Assessments
According to SHL, ‘Behavioral Assessments’ are a great indicator of how a person might behave on the job. If a company has created a distinct culture, it’s most vital they find people that are going to behave in keeping with their values.
These tests are subcategorized in slightly more abstract terms such as ‘Situational Judgement Tests’ and ‘Universal Framework Competency’. But the idea can be conceptualized in a fairly forthright way: How is this person going to work with their peers in certain situations? How are they going to manage certain situations and the people around them? How will they react when they’re faced with unexpected setbacks and problems? Simply put, how does an employer know this person going to behave the way they want them to behave?
Personality Assessments
‘Personality Assessments’ are similar in design.
They’re broken down by SHL into categories such as ‘Occupational Personality Questionnaires’ and ‘Personal Motivation Questionnaires’. In the traditional recruitment process, an employer might try and identify these ‘personal qualities’ during the face-to-face interview process.
But there are obvious limitations and banana skins that we humans are exposed to when we’re forced to make decisions about people using just our eyes, ears and ‘gut feelings’. We make judgments about people, often irrational judgments, based on what we see and what we hear. Common Pre-employment Test
By screening a candidate with a personality and behavioral assessment, you remove the potential for conscious and subconscious biases to influence the decision-making process, adding a degree of objectivity to what was once a very subjective practice.
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Are You Ready For A Pre-Employment Test?
As more and more companies strive to build a successful culture within their workplace today, they’re constantly redefining the ways they go about their business.
The hiring process is an integral part of this, and the emphasis placed on the results of psychometric testing can make or break the most ‘qualified’ job applications.
If you want to find out how you might fair in these aptitude tests, then there are plenty of places you can find mock tests online that will allow you to get a feel for what these tests (like the SHL test) are like. Common Pre-employment Test
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