Pros and Cons of Pre-Employment Testing

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Pros and Cons of Employment Testing Employment testing is a standardized series of problems or questions that assess a person’s knowledge, skills, abilities, or other characteristics. There are many forms of employment testing: cognitive aptitude, psychomotor abilities, job knowledge, work sample, personality and vocational interest. And with every test there are pros and cons. One benefit of the employment test is a time saving factor. Time is a very important factor in today’s working environment. Testing can reduce the time spent on applicants whose characteristics, skills and abilities do not match what is needed. The process can help reduce a multiple candidate list to a shorter more manageable and suitable candidate file. Research has shown that through testing, businesses have been able to improve the quality and duration of employment for new hires. With this as the case, there is an improvement in the desired business outcomes: lower turnover, increased sales and profitability, higher customer satisfaction and higher productivity. Statistics are available and the following chart shows the results from one of many sets of results. It indicates that, on average, the higher the score on the exam, the better the job performance and vice versa, the lower the score the weaker the job performance. Cost savings is another benefit to administering the tests. The cost of making a wrong decision is high and testing may be a particularly worthwhile venture to prevent these decisions. A wrong decision in the hiring process can lead to increased training costs, costs because of poor performance or errors and the costs of replacement of the employee. In the employee turnover process alone the cost saving can be realized with the reported average turnover cost of one third to one half of a non-management employee salary. This number increases to one to two

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