Recruiting, hiring and training of new employees is expensive. You have to recruite or advertise a position, then you start the interview process. During the interview you are trying to determine if this is a candidate that would be a good fit for your company and if the candidate seems to have the skill set that the position requires. Then, when you do bring a new hire in to fill the position you also have to train that person for your company specific standards to the position. All of this is costly in terms of time and money. If you have made a good hire, it is well worth the investment. However, if you hire that person and find out within the few months that the position just isnt a good fit, you are out that money. Worse yet, you need to start all over to fill the position.

While interviews and background checks are a great tool, another tool that may be useful to your organization is assessment testing. There are hundreds of different types of tests out there – skills testing, personality testing, behavior testing, even IQ testing if you are interested. Generally, a company will have agreed to start using these “forecasters” for new employees. Before you start to test potential new hires, you may want to have your top performers that are already working with your company take the tests. This will provide you with a set of “benchmarks” that you can use to gauge new hire testing on. There are traits and characteristics that your top performers have that you may like to see in your new hire candidates as well. Once benchmarks are set, use these to determine if your new hire will be a fit with your organization.

There are some studies out there that indicate as many as 25% of new hires don’t make it the first 3 months within an organization. That is an expensive number. Assessment testing can be a very low cost alternative to be utilitized as another tool to “be sure before you hire”.

BackTrack, Inc