Pre-employment assessment tools enter the smartphone age

Pre-employment assessment tools predate the personal computer. For a long time, employers have used paper questionnaires like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator to judge a candidate's fit for an organization.

This process was ripe for computerization, and after moving to PCs and the internet, pre-employment assessment tools have reached the ultimate in convenience in the form of smartphone apps jazzed up with gamification and AI.

Mobile pre-employment assessment tools are improving the candidate experience and giving employers quicker access to bigger, more diverse talent pools, according to a recent article in Human Resource Executive.

Until "fairly recently," job candidates for consumer products giant Procter & Gamble (P&G) had to drive or even fly to testing centers to use the company's pre-employment assessment tools, wrote Senior Editor Andrew McIlvaine. Now they interact with Aon Consulting's Global Assessment and Talent Engine on their phones.

Some P&G managers resisted using an off-the-shelf tool instead of one developed in-house, fearing that they would lose their differentiation in the talent market. Their solution: explaining to the managers that while parts of the assessment come from a commercial product, the overall assessment and its use in the P&G culture would be unique.

The company has the metrics to prove that the new mobile tool leads to a better candidate experience, which more organizations see as a crucial advantage in their recruitment efforts. P&G introduced a net promoter score to ask candidates how likely they are to speak positively about the company after taking the assessment. Ninety-three percent responded neutral or positive.

Jane.ai, MapRecruit and ThriveMap are some of the other entries in this new generation of pre-employment assessment tools that use AI, sentiment analysis, gamification and simulation to try to judge how well a candidate will get along with others and adapt to change.

Despite the appeal of such technology, experts advised HR leaders to tread cautiously before buying pre-employment assessment tools. Their key advice included the following:

• Have a technical expert do a deep dive to ensure that the products work as advertised.
• Look beyond old-school personality assessments for qualities like learning agility, adaptability and comfort working in non-hierarchical settings.
• Run a pilot before deploying a tool to the entire organization.

This article is part of a content exchange between TechTarget and Human Resource Executive, which produces the HR Technology Conference.