Filling a new or existing position is an expensive proposition. According to Indeed, hiring a new employee can cost between $4,000 to $20,000, not including the new employee’s salary and benefits. While the numbers differ based on the type and experience level of the position and the company’s industry sector and location, hiring costs a lot of money.
This number is only the starting point because you also incur costs when you post the job and for the time you spend reviewing and interviewing candidates. Other expenses associated with a new hire that can quickly add up include:
- Administrative tasks such as onboarding, including paperwork
- Low initial productivity while new hires learn and assimilate into the company
- Equipment costs such as computers and phones
- Possibility of attrition due to high turnover among new hires
Since hiring a new employee requires a sizable investment, you must do as much as possible to control the expenses. Adding the eSkill Talent Assessment PlatformTM to your hiring process should be a top priority because it provides detailed, highly relevant assessments of candidates’ skill sets. This can help you reduce hiring costs by around 70% and decrease time-to-hire by approximately 60%.
How Pre-Employment Tests Save You Money
There used to be two ways human resources (HR) learned about potential candidates–personal recommendations and resumes submitted by applicants. Applicant tracking systems (ATS) streamlined the process, but the first step in searching for a candidate started with reading a resume. Once you created a shortlist of qualified candidates, you scheduled phone interviews and then selected candidates for in-person interviews. Overall, the process was slow, time-consuming, and imprecise.
Pre-employment tests streamline the process by enabling recruiters to instantly identify qualified candidates and eliminate unqualified applicants. HR teams have access to a library of hundreds of pre-prepared skills tests. They also have the flexibility to create custom tests and add their own questions. The reports generated by eSkill are clear and precise and allow you to interpret the findings quickly.
Unlike traditional hiring processes that began with a resume review, pre-employment testing allows you to start with a skills assessment so you can see who has the required skills. Unqualified applicants are eliminated before resumes are reviewed. This saves HR teams hours that they used to spend poring over resumes.
Pre-employment testing also helps you eliminate unconscious bias that can enter into traditional hiring methods by providing you with precise, objective data that is divorced from cultural or interpersonal factors. This helps you diversify your workforce as well as avoid legal challenges.
Resumes are still important because they add context to pre-employment test results and give you a more detailed, nuanced understanding of each candidate’s background. However, reviewing resumes for individuals lacking the necessary skills is pointless. When you identify a smaller, more highly skilled pool of candidates, you save on interview costs and allow HR and hiring managers more time to spend on productive activities.
If you want to see how much money you can save with pre-employment tests, try eSkill’s cost savings calculator.
Other Benefits of Pre-Employment Testing
Pre-employment testing goes beyond saving you time and money while hiring new employees. It can also help you retain employees. During the hiring process, skills tests provide you with a baseline for each employee, which allows you to see their strength areas and identify knowledge and skills gaps. This helps you create onboarding processes tailored to each new hire’s needs. If their results show they have already mastered some of the material, you can eliminate portions that pertain to those areas and focus on deficient areas.
Pre-employment tests also help companies develop training and employee development programs, another important tool that increases employee retention. Based on the testing results and reports, you can tailor each employee’s development program to address skill and knowledge deficiencies. This guides each worker’s progress and helps you maximize your training and employee development investment return.
Pre-employment testing helps you avoid the high cost of hiring mistakes. This means you will spend less time and money repeating the job search process when an employee does not work out and minimize other expenses that can result from a poor-performing employee, such as lost customers, team disruption, and lost productivity.
Interested in Using Pre-Employment Tests to Lower Your HR Costs?
Adding pre-employment testing to your hiring process simplifies recruiting, decreases time-to-hire, and reduces hiring costs. With the eSkill Talent Assessment PlatformTM, you will immediately see the difference.
Do you want to learn how pre-employment testing can help you to find top candidates while reducing hiring costs? Contact us to request a demo.
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