Criteria Corp Blog

Ghosting is a modern disappearing act: after consistent communication with someone, poof, that person just disappears—like a ghost. Well, it’s not just a dating problem for millennials anymore! More and more, seemingly normal job candidates are ghosting on job interviews.

Pre-employment tests are flexible – they can be administered at just about any stage in your hiring funnel. There’s no single, one-size-fits-all strategy for when to administer tests to candidates. It really depends on where your organization will get the most value out of the predictive information that pre-employment tests provide.

Earlier this week, we put out our 2018 Pre-Employment Testing Benchmark Report which sheds light onto the hiring practices and priorities of companies across all industries. Based on a survey of hiring professionals, the report reveals some interesting trends in the hiring space.

Earlier this year, we set out to learn more about how companies incorporate pre-employment tests into their hiring processes. We put out a survey asking hiring professionals to share their perspectives on everything from hiring priorities and tactics, the types of tests they use, who they’re choosing to test, and what stage of the hiring process their administering those tests.

Pre-employment tests are growing in popularity as a way for employers to learn more about their candidates - 82% of companies are now using some form of pre-employment test. These tests provide objective insight into your applicant pool beyond what you can get from intuition alone. But there are still a number of misconceptions that some employers may have about pre-employment tests. Let’s dive into a couple:

Pre-employment testing can be one of the most predictive hiring factors when it comes to future job success, but not all pre-employment tests are created equal. The purpose of administering a pre-employment assessment is ultimately to get useful, data-driven information that will help you make a more informed hiring decision – a better decision than you could have made by relying on resumes, interviews, and intuition alone. But pre-hire tests can only deliver that value if they are validated to actually predict future job performance.

Pre-employment tests help you make more informed hiring decisions by shedding light on your candidates’ skills and abilities. But setting up a testing strategy that produces great results for your organization depends heavily on the assessment provider you choose. If you’re in the market for a pre-employment testing provider, here are some of the questions you should be asking:

Last month we unveiled the new HireSelect, which includes some advanced new features along with an updated user interface to make it easier than ever for you to achieve your hiring goals. And thanks to a partnership with ZipRecruiter, we’re excited to offer you one of the most exciting new features: one-click job postings to ZipRecruiter, directly from within the HireSelect platform.

Resume gaps may seem like a kiss of death on an otherwise promising candidate’s CV, but like any other complicated situation, it really depends on the circumstances. As an employer, you might make any number of negative assumptions when you see a resume gap: maybe the candidate is lazy or indecisive; maybe the candidate was fired from their last position; maybe other companies haven’t hired this candidate for a reason. While these thoughts are natural, they’re ultimately just assumptions that should be investigated, especially if you have a really great candidate in front of you.

The perfect job candidate is getting harder and harder to find. Unemployment rates are at a historical low, and there are now more job openings in the US than there are available workers.  This makes it exceptionally challenging for employers to find and attract the right talent for any given job opening. Whether the skills gap is to blame, or if companies are being unrealistically demanding with job requirements, the result is that many companies will need to make some compromises in order to fill their open positions.