How Technology Enabled the Pre-Employment Screening Process
Taking pre-hire assessments online offers flexibility to employers.
Before online employee assessments, on-site testing centers handled pre-employment screening. Today, innovations allow sophisticated predictive skills and character screening from wherever the employee is located, saving companies and candidates time and money. What can these tools do for your hiring process?
Changes in Hiring
The COVID-19 pandemic has changed hiring in significant ways that may lead to long-lasting changes even after “normal” is able to resume. Of course, in-person work interactions are valuable and often necessary, but companies will be evaluating whether some parts of the hiring and onboarding process can be handled remotely and whether that is an advantage for the company.
While pre-hire assessments might have previously been completed at a testing center or at an office location, they can now be completed remotely without a great deal of time or effort on the part of companies or candidates.
Pre-hire assessments can tell your hiring team whether a candidate will be a good cognitive or behavioral match for both the job being offered and for the existing team. Since they are based on objective data (answers to questions) given by the candidate, they don’t depend on any in-person data such as tone of voice or body language. As such, pre-hire assessments are perfectly suited to being completed online.
Online technologies make it easier to evaluate candidates.
Technology Making a New Way
Other new technologies make it possible to screen employees remotely in other ways. Most applications are now designed to be completed and submitted online. In states where in-person contact is still being limited, interviews are also being held over videoconferencing platforms like Zoom or custom solutions created especially for video interviews. Checking references and conducting background checks can also be done remotely.
It seems odd and unusual that a hire could be made entirely with remote technologies and that company personnel might never meet the new hire face-to-face, but that kind of process has become common during COVID-19 lockdowns in multiple states.
When the pandemic recedes and it becomes safe to interact in person again, companies may decide that it is better to have in-person interviews and meetings. Indeed, there are elements of interpersonal communication that cannot be conveyed the same way over a Zoom window as in person.
At the same time, some companies will probably use this difficult experience to make the jump to a more remote hiring process, either entirely or mostly, because of its monetary and time savings for both the employer and employee.
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