Reasons for Pre-employment Testing

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The popularity of pre-employment testing is on the rise. Since it’s hard to get an accurate idea of what kind of an employee an individual be during a short interview, employers have turned to these hiring assessment tests to try to determine if an applicant is a good fit for their workplace. Businesses that don’t use such forms of employee selection might want to reconsider.

For starters, the Society for Human Resource Management estimates that as many as 45 percent of resumes contain some sort of falsehoods. The lies could be as small as inflating the tasks the worker was responsible for or as large as claiming education they never received. Employers who conduct background checks are usually protected from such because the screening process brings the lies to the employer’s attention before the make a hiring mistake.

According to the U.S. Department of Commerce, 30 percent of small business failure is caused by employee theft. Some experts estimate that this theft costs employers somewhere around $120 billion each year. One way that hiring managers avoid these problems is by having applicants take personality tests. These tests ask job candidates different questions about who they are and how they would handle certain circumstances. Those whose answers show to be dishonest

Another thing that can be exposed through personality tests and background checks is violent tendencies. According to AmericanDataBank.com, approximately 2,000,000 workers are victims of violent crimes that occur while on the job each year. This in turn costs employers around $4.2 billion. Since many individuals who do commit these crimes are later found out to have a history of violence, conducting background checks can seriously help to avoid this workplace problem. Those who have yet to commit such a crime but have the capacity can often be excluded from the hiring process through personality tests.

These forms of employee selection can also help employers avoid workers who would sexually harass other staff members for similar reasons. Since this is another serious problem in the workplace, employers can help guard themselves from liability and protect their workers by utilizing these tests.