Results from a recent survey of over 300 HR professionals conducted by Wonderlic show a vast majority of respondents believe pre-employment assessments lead to better hiring decisions.
Among those who use pre-employment assessments, over 95% said so. In fact, even 85% of those who work at companies that don’t use testing said “making better hire decisions” is an actual, realized benefit of using them.
By contrast, only about 25% of pre-employment assessments users said they can lead to developing strong leaders; and a similar percentage indicated they can be used to identify opportunities for employee development or performance management. Naturally, there was some overlap: in the end, only 36% of pre-employment assessment users indicate that “Developing Strong Leaders”, “Identifying Opportunities for Employee Development”, or both are strategic objectives that can be addressed with pre-employment assessment data.
The following chart presents the frequency of pre-employment assessment used for tactical use, as based on the percent of respondents who chose “Making Better Hiring Decisions” as a potential or realized outcome; compared to the frequency of strategic use of pre-employment assessment data, based on the percent of respondents who chose “Developing Strong Leaders” and/or “Identifying Opportunities for Employee Development” as potential or realized outcomes.
These findings support the key hypothesis behind this research: that data from pre-employment assessments is underutilized for strategic purposes. The 36% who are using pre-employment assessment data in their leadership and employee development efforts are getting more out of their investment dollar than other test users. Data from reliable, validated pre-employment assessments can provide valuable insights for HR management well beyond hiring decisions. If you believe your company may not be getting everything it can out of its employee assessment data, please contact us at Wonderlic.
