Recruiting is a crucial organizational function. If human resource is your most important resource, then recruiting is the most important function in building up that resource. Research suggests that a bad hire can cost up to 30% of an employee’s first year pay! Add to that non-monetary costs of a bad hire like loss of team productivity, dent in team morale, emotional cost for the manager and a possible loss of reputation, and you can see how crucial a hiring decision can be.
With all that being said, recruiting is no easy job. It is an art that few HR managers can fully claim themselves to be masters of. There is a whole ladder of steps involved and each step can cause an arm and leg. External HR consultancy fees, internal HR team maintenance cost, job board fees, career fairs, background checks, multiple rounds of interviews, onboarding and training – the list goes on and on. Estimates suggest it takes anything from $4000 to $7000 and around 52 days to fill up a new position!
No wonder you would want to take the help of tools and technologies to reduce these costs. Cloud based aptitude exam is one such tool that can really speed up your hiring process while cutting costs.
Aptitude exams are an accurate and efficient way of measuring key candidate traits for role suitability. Some things you could track with an aptitude test during hiring are:
- Cognitive Abilities:
- Employment suitability
- Key Insights about the candidate
- A range of skills like numeric ability, verbal acumen, mechanical dexterity, logical coherence etc.
What’s more, we can tailor and structure aptitude exams to measure specific traits and skill sets as per the job requirement. For instance:
- FLUID INTELLIGENCE: This is the intelligence involved in quickly processing novel information and responding to new stimuli successfully in real-time. One could devise an aptitude test for this by including:
a) Puzzles
b) Spatial test
c) Problem-Solving
d) Visual Tasks
e) Match and click tasks
f) Logical reasoning
g) Lateral thinking problems
- CRYSTALLISED INTELLIGENCE: This is a measure of using past learning and experience in the current scenario to come up with answers, solutions and optimal responses. An aptitude test to measure this intelligence could include:
a) Reading comprehension
b) Data analysis
c) Quizzes
d) Language skills
e) Decision making problems
- PHYSICAL AND PERCEPTUAL INTELLIGENCE: This measures the mechanical ability, spatial awareness and quickly input information form the surroundings. It could be a great asset for many “hands-on“jobs like technicians, mechanics, firefighters, and surgeons. An aptitude test for this could involve:a) Mechanical tasks
b) Spatial arrangement,maze, geometrical puzzles|
c) Perceptual and short-term memory skills
- VOCATIONAL SKILLS: Finally, we can tailor aptitude tests to measure specific vocational skills as per the job role. Some of these could be:
a) Electronics Assessments
b) Lawyer Assessments
c)Accountancy MCQ based tests
d)Pharmacy based drug knowledge tests
We have already talked about the long-drawn costly processes that recruitment is plagued with. With these tailor-made aptitude exam targeting specific intelligences and skills, we can really cut down on the costs and time investments. Let’s see how Aptitude Tests are a boon for hiring managers:
- BEST SCREENING TOOL: With a large pool of candidates (estimates suggest for every job position, you are at least competing with 250 applicants), aptitude tests provide the best means to efficiently and reliably screen out your potential hires. You can get a much more competent smaller focussed pool of competent applicants to further probe through other tools in your hiring process.
- PREDICT JOB PERFORMANCE: Research has shown that aptitude tests predict on-job performance accurately. This reduces chances of making a bad hire and ensuring your human resource is always top-notch.
- ASSESS JOB SUITABILITY: Well, job-fitment is an equally important metric to measure while hiring. With aptitude tests, you can assess with a fair degree of accuracy whether your potential hire is a best-fit for the job. After all, not everyone is hardwired for every job and there is not point in filling up your team with round pegs in square holes!
- UNBIASED AND OBJECTIVE ASSESSMENT: Hiring managers are also humans, and they come to the hiring table with their own baggage of prejudices and biases. Aptitude tests provide a totally impartial objective manner of assessing critical trait of your applicants.
- SUITABLE FOR COMPLEX JOBS: A pleasantly surprising feature of aptitude tests is that they become better in their predictions with increasing job complexity. This is a real win-win because a bad hiring decision hurts more in critical complex job roles. For your key positions, you want only the best for your business!!
- SCALABLE AND STANDARDISED: With the workforce pool expanding with each year, it is very important to have a hiring solution which can scale up efficiently. With cloud based fully online Aptitude Exams, one can scale up to however many applicants we want to assess.Also, these tests are standardised cutting across geographies and times to ensure you have a repeatable process and comparable records of all your hiring decisions.
- AI AND TECH ENABLED: Most of the cloud-based Aptitude Exam tools are fully automated with AI-enabled grading and evaluation to provide fast, error-free and unbiased candidate scorecards. This reduces the burden on the hiring team to assess and manually compute test scores, while at the same time providing immediate feedback to the applicants.All this makes for a smooth and pleasant experience throughout the process. Also, these tools are enabled with remote-proctoring and anti-cheating features to make the exam fair and just.
Your people are crucial to the success of your organization. You should not brook any let-ups in your recruitment process. Hire only the best, and follow it up with going the extra mile in caring for your people!
Create a world-class workplace that truly nurtures its trailblazing dynamic people which is only possible if you’re dependent upon the aptitude tests at the time of hiring people.
