Criteria Corp Blog

So many factors go into every single hiring decision you make. Hiring is not a simple process, and neither is the way that each organization goes about making those decisions. We recently put out a survey to learn more about how hiring professionals attract, hire, and retain their teams, and we published our findings in our second annual Pre-Employment Testing Benchmark Report. One of the things we were curious about was which factors or tools organizations are using to make those all important hiring decisions. Here’s what we found:

Another year of HR Tech has come and gone. Here are five of our biggest takeaways from HR Tech 2019:

Earlier this year, we surveyed hiring professionals across all industries to learn more about how they hire, and we released the results in our second annual Pre-Employment Testing Benchmark Report.

The last few years have been characterized by historically low unemployment rates combined with the ever-rising number of job openings. These factors have driven a major shift in the job market, from one that was employer-driven to one that is now more candidate-driven. As a result, we've seen the development of several positive changes in the hiring landscape,  including the growing importance of employer branding and candidate experience. With so many job openings available and not enough people to fill them, companies have had to adopt new ways to compete for the limited talent available.

Today we’ve released the second annual Pre-Employment Testing Benchmark Report for 2019. When we launched the first report last year, our goal was to understand how companies make hiring decisions and what their biggest priorities are in today’s hiring landscape. We put out a survey asking hiring professionals to share their insights, and we got a wide range of responses from people across all industries and company sizes. The results ran the gamut from relatively intuitive to completely surprising!

In a competitive candidate market, time is of the essence. There are a lot of factors that every company must compete on in order to attract talent – salary, benefits, location, and opportunities for career growth, to name a few. And now more than ever, the entire candidate experience can make or break whether or not a candidate accepts your offer. But there’s also another often overlooked aspect that can make or break your ability to snag top candidates: time.

Nowadays, people do just about everything on their phones: they buy groceries, chat with friends, get medical advice, look for love and even apply for jobs. According to one survey, 89% of job seekers use mobile devices to aid in their job search. If your company hasn’t adopted a smartphone-friendly job application process, then you could be missing out on a large pool of applicants! 

Culture fit has been a buzzword for a long time, with very little consensus about what it actually means. On the surface, culture fit is something that any company would desire in a prospective employee: someone who has bought into the organization’s mission, vision, and values. But over time, “culture fit” has warped into something less desirable: a bias towards hiring people who look, act, and think just like everyone else in the organization.

Adaptive assessments, sometimes referred to as computer adaptive testing (CAT), represent a type of assessment that adapts to the test-taker’s ability level. While adaptive assessments would not have been possible in the early days of pencil and paper tests, computers make it possible to deliver assessments that can adapt to each test-taker in real-time.

In a hiring market dominated by a growing skills gap and the persistent challenge of finding qualified job candidates, many employers are increasingly turning to training programs to pick up some of the slack. After all, just because you couldn’t find the perfect candidate for the role doesn’t mean you can leave the position open indefinitely.