3 Tips To Help You Navigate Pre-Hiring Tests

As seen on Forbes.

For recruiters and HR departments, pre-hiring tests are necessary tools that help make the hiring process more efficient and effective. Back in the day, pre-hiring tests were nothing more than basic quizzes or assessments administered in person or via mail, focusing primarily on general knowledge or basic skills relevant to the job — they usually took no more than 15 to 20 minutes too.

Nowadays, companies are requiring more extensive tests to further verify competency. According to a survey, 40% of HR departments plan to increase the pre-hire tests they expect candidates to take when interviewing for a new job. 

With fewer job openings and increased competition in the job market, acing a pre-hiring test sometimes becomes crucial to ensure that your application remains in consideration. Here are three things that you should know about pre-hiring tests. 

Understand The Test

It’s crucial to know the kind of pre-hiring test that you’ll be taking ahead of time so that you can prepare for it effectively.

Most recruiters will detail the test in writing to give you an idea of what to expect and how long it’s going to take ahead of time. The most popular pre-hiring tests are cognitive ability tests, which attempt to give recruiters an idea of a candidate’s mental abilities. 

This can be as simple as a free IQ test, to a more well-rounded tool such as the Wonderlic Personnel Test, which tests verbal reasoning, numerical reasoning, logical reasoning, and spatial reasoning under timed conditions. 

HR departments who care about culture fit may also administer personality tests to determine a candidate’s ability to integrate into the company culture and work effectively with existing teams. These tests are designed to give recruiters insights into an individual’s personality traits and behavioral preferences.

For more specialized roles, recruiters may require candidates to partake in skills assessments. For example, a software developer might be asked to complete coding challenges or troubleshoot programming problems. Meanwhile, sales candidates may be asked to demonstrate their pitching, objection handling, and deal-closing abilities through mock sales calls, presentations, and role-play. 

Still, some companies prefer to assess a candidate’s skills in real-time by engaging in trial work. Typically reserved for candidates already in the later stages of the hiring process, trial work involves giving them very similar tasks related to their future day-to-day operations. This approach allows employers to directly observe how candidates perform tasks as if they were already hired to do the job.

Whatever method a company uses, understanding the nature of a pre-hiring test allows candidates to better prepare themselves and puts them in the best position possible when taking the test.

Practice Makes Perfect

Do you get nervous during exams? You’re not alone. Skills-based hiring and its tests are known to cause anxiety in many candidates, causing job seekers to miss out on the opportunity they would be a great fit for.

That being said, pre-hiring tests aren’t going away soon, so it’s best for candidates to seek out practice tests to ease some of these nerves. Not all tests are worth practicing for, especially personality tests which don’t necessarily have right or wrong answers.

However, for skills-based assessments like coding challenges, technical exams, or situational judgment tests, practice can significantly improve your performance and alleviate anxiety. If you can, try to make connections with somebody already in the company to get an idea of the kind of tests that you may encounter and try to prepare for that ahead of time. 

Many companies also use standardized tests that you can look up online and do practice runs with. Companies customize these standardized tests for their own purpose, so doing practice tests based on similar formats will not give away the exact answers to the test. However, they can still help you by getting you familiarized with the type of questions that you may encounter, and whether or not there is a time limit.

Know When To Walk Away 

There’s no doubt that pre-hiring tests are critical for companies who want to make sure that they are hiring the best people they can. Despite making the hiring process longer, pre-hiring tests help balance the subjective nature of interviews.

That being said, such extra steps have recently been shown to be taxing for candidates. In fact, we’re seeing some applicants complete up to 10 to 15 hours of pre-hire work on top of interviews, a lot of the time for free. 

While beneficial for employers, it’s easy to see why many job candidates may find this setup onerous. Many have cautioned job applicants to be wary of employers who employ pre-hiring tests of such length, calling it unpaid labor and speculative work in disguise.

While there’s no hard and fast rule when deciding when a pre-hiring test is too long or tedious, it’s crucial to consider the context of the test. If you’re vying for more senior management positions, then you should expect a more thorough and rigorous hiring process that will be appropriate for the position and the compensation package that it comes with. 

However, if you’re applying for more junior roles but are being asked to complete a multi-hour assessment or project, trust your gut instincts here. If it feels overly excessive, I would advise you to walk away while you’re still early in the process. With job opportunities being a bit tight at the moment, it’s even more crucial to be strategic about the opportunities you pursue and the time and effort you invest in them. Rooting for you!