As a recruiter, navigating the process of searching through, analysing a massive pile of CVs, and deciding who to move forward in the recruitment funnel based on incomplete and insufficient information can get very challenging.
This is where pre-employment candidate screening comes into the picture.
The employee screening process helps recruiters develop a more accurate and valid recruitment process and make an evidence-based selection of candidates. When couled with various new screening tools, pre-employment screening can help speed up the overall recruitment process and help hire the top talent for the position.
In this blog, we explore what pre-employment screening is in more detail, along with the top three ways a detailed pre-employment screening can help recruiters hire the most suitable candidates for a specific role.
What Is Pre-Employment Screening?
Pre-employment screening refers primarily to different kinds of assessments that candidates have to undergo during recruitment. These tests help recruiters assess different aspects of candidates, including their skillsets and personality traits.
Pre-employment screening can either be used as an initial screening tool or during the later stages of the hiring process.
How Can Pre-Employment Screening Help You Hire Top Talent?
Here are some of the top ways a thorough pre-employment screening can help you hire the best talent –
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Offers a High Level of Objectivity
Recruiting suitable and skilled candidates is a tough job. With some level of bias that every recruiter has, it gets difficult to be truly objective in screening and recruiting candidates.
Pre-employment screening and testing give recruiters an objective way to recruit candidates, measure their competencies, and accurately rate their skills. It allows you to check their academic and employment qualifications in detail to give you a good idea about an employee’s productivity and expectations. In the case of entry-level positions, you can check the candidate’s education and training, type and dates of degree/diplomas, grades/GPAs, previous company verification, and other types of credentials, along with taking detailed feedback from teachers and administrators.
Instead of just randomly deciding whether to advance someone to the next round based on personal opinions or a gut feeling, pre-employment screening tests give recruiters excellent tools to rely on for an impartial test of the candidate’s skills.
This makes sure that you hire people who are qualified and willing to do what it takes to ensure that the business reaches new levels of success. These detailed checks allow you to assess an applicant’s overall approach, their capacity to perform under stress, as well as how they work in a team.
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Reduce Negligent Hiring and Risks
The decision to hire or retain an employee comes with a great deal of responsibility and risk. Recruiters have a moral obligation to hire top talent in the form of competent people who are a good fit for specific roles.
Even if an applicant seems genuine and motivated through the application, it might not present a true picture of a person. Several indicators allow you to predict the candidate’s potential future behaviour after settling into the job and starting to work for the organisation.
Doing a thorough background check helps you find out aspects such as their identity, credit checks, and also qualifications checks, that is, how the references match up with the credentials.
Failing to exercise reasonable care in hiring or retaining an employee can hurt all the parties involved. The recruiter, therefore, should be aware if the person was unfit or incompetent for the job role, thereby saving the third parties from exposure to an unreasonable risk of harm.
In such a case, employee screening can be a great way to help reduce your exposure to negligent hiring and retention risks.
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Helps Assess Candidates’ True Potential
When applying for a job role, applicants often provide inaccurate information and include misleading statements in their CVs to impress the recruiter. This makes the usual methods for gathering information very subjective and unreliable.
Pre-employment screening such as personality tests can offer recruiters reliable data-driven insights. Further, commonly used evaluation elements such as resumes and interviews can help them thoroughly assess the candidates and make better hiring decisions.
To Wrap
Pre-employment screening is an excellent way to help recruiters develop a reliable, accurate, and efficient recruitment process. Apart from speeding up your search for top talent, employee screening also helps assess candidates in terms of skillsets, cognitive abilities, and communication, thus making it one of the most objective ways of predicting the candidate’s suitability.
The bottom line is, with a fiercely competitive recruitment market, it becomes crucial for recruiters to use the best strategies to attract and retain the top talent. Pre-employment screening and past company verification ensures that you do not let a weaker/ not-suitable candidate make it to the final stage of the recruitment process while identifying the best candidates who might go unnoticed in traditional employment screening methods.
