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Pre-employment Assessments: Identify Top Candidates, Save Money and Reduce Turnover

Published on Oct 31, 2017

Pre-employment sales assessments play an important role in the overall hiring process.

They help organizations identify candidates that are most likely to excel in their sales role. Pre-employment assessments also provide additional benefits like decreasing time and cost in the candidate hiring process, reducing turnover and improving morale. These added benefits are crucial to sales organizations as they are facing an average annual turnover in their sales force of 25 – 30 percent, according to Harvard Business Review. This equates to hiring and training an entire sales organization approximately every four years. Talk about expensive!

There are a variety of pre-employment assessment tests organizations can use to screen potential candidates: personality, cognitive, skills and job knowledge, just to name a few.  According to the HireRight 2016 Annual Employment Screening Benchmark Survey:

“Sixty-five percent of businesses that responded planned to make investments in improving their ability to find qualified job candidates.”

But how do you know which assessment(s) your sales organization should implement? Below are a few tips on how to determine which pre-employment assessments would be best for your sales organization

1.   Valid

Analysis: Pre-employment assessments must be valid for the open sales role.

Methodology: Ensure that tests measure specific job-related abilities or skills. Assessment results should be quantifiable and predict the success or failure of the candidate’s future job performance. Sales organizations should be able to demonstrate that candidates who do well on the test perform well in their sales job, versus those that do not perform well.

2.   Relevant

Analysis: Pre-employment assessments must measure skills, abilities or characteristics that are relevant to the job the candidate is applying for.

Methodology: A simple way for organizations to verify relevancy on a pre-employment assessment is to perform a Job Requirement Analysis against the sales position being filled. Once an analysis has been completed of the objectives, skills and abilities needed to complete the sales role, organizations will be able to quickly identify appropriate and relevant pre-employment tests.

3.   Reliable

Analysis: Pre-employment assessments must provide consistent results.

Methodology: For a pre-employment assessment to be reliable in measuring a specific job skill or ability, a candidate’s score should be consistent each time they take the test. Significant variances in a candidate’s test results decreases the value of the assessment predicting future job performance. 

4.   Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO)

Analysis: Pre-employment assessments must meet all EEO laws.

Methodology: Periodically, pre-employment tests are challenged in court. Organizations must verify their tests do not violate local, state or federal EEO laws, including Title VII

These are just a few tips sales organizations should be aware of prior to implementing pre-employment assessments. Revecent’s Sales Consultants can help your organization assess, recruit and optimize sales talent to accelerate revenue growth.

Interested in an evaluation of your organization’s pre-employment assessment process? Revecent can complete an analysis of your sales force hiring strategy to identify areas of strength and areas of opportunities. Request a consult now and start seeing powerful results.

Revecent is a national sales recruiting and sales enablement consulting firm. We help technology and professional service companies recruit and optimize sales talent to accelerate growth. Contact us today to see how we can help your organization’s sales team exceed expectations.

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