Pre-employment testing has been on the rise in recent years. However, with more candidates than ever applying for the same roles, how can employers choose the best person for the position in the most efficient way possible?
With Covid-19 creating more job seekers and transforming workplaces into virtual environments, hiring has only become more difficult.
This post introduces pre-employment accounting tests that facilitate employment—making it easier to narrow down qualified candidates so that recruiters can find the right people to fit into their team.
What Is An Accounting Test?
Accounting tests are skill-based pre-employment tests. Skill-based tests are the most common pre-employment tests and are designed to ask a series of questions that evaluate candidates technical skills. These are practical tests which simulate situations that a candidate would face in day to day work activities.
The information from this test is used to produce a performance report that indicates a candidates knowledge and proficiency in certain areas. Candidates who are underqualified or have a lack of relevant experience are quickly eliminated from the candidate pool without having to use extensive resources. This information can then be used to guide a recruiters decision when hiring the most suitable candidate.
Benefits Of Accounting Tests
Pre-employment accounting tests have numerous benefits in the short term and long term. Some of these benefits are:
Objective screening
These tests produce results that can compare all candidates applying for the position. This leads to the team being able to invest time interviewing with the best talent, helping to reduce the pool of candidates and the number of resources previously needed to screen candidates in a face to face interview.
Lowers Turnover Rate
Pre-employment tests aim to hire candidates who are a good fit for the role. Accounting tests are no different and aim to accomplish this by aligning the technical skills candidates have with jobs that require those same skills. This process helps towards hiring suited candidates, increasing retention rates.
Lowers Costs
Hiring is an expensive process. Costs like advertising and interviewing add up fast. When done wrong, this can lead to turnover, which can cost companies thousands.
Accounting tests lower these costs both directly and indirectly by limiting the number of candidates who need to be interviewed and reducing the risk of hiring someone not suited to the job.
What Does An Accounting Test Look Like?
Accounting tests cover a range of aspects, depending on what the employer wants. The main areas covered tend to be accounting fundamentals, concepts and numerical, verbal and logical reasoning.
While many accounting tests are made up of multi-choice questions, there are also options to have candidates write their own answers or even interactive chatbot assessments like this accounting test.
When Should Recruiters Use Accounting Tests?
Recruiters should use accounting tests when they feel as though their current method of hiring is no longer efficient or is not effective. Pre-employment tests are tools designed to facilitate the interview process and uncover unsuitable candidates early on—saving teams time and resources.
Pre-employment tests are best utilised when implemented in the early stages of the interview process. However, employers can choose at which point they want candidates to undergo assessment.
How To Find The Right Accounting Test For Your Team?
Pre-employment tests are a set of questions that are designed to test for specific skills. This means that choosing the right pre-employment assessment for your team is a big deal. If the wrong test is used, the candidates an organisation is looking for are less likely to be found. Resulting in ineffective use of time and resources – exactly what these tests set out to avoid!
However, there are ways to ensure that employers choose a test that works well for their organisation. Following are some main aspects to pre-employment tests that organisations need to consider when selecting a vendor to go through.
- Does the test comply with all legal requirements?
Recruiters have a responsibility to protect candidates’ privacy and rights. Complying with laws and regulations around testing is a serious matter and should be a top priority.
- Are there quality questions?
Recruiters need to ensure that vendors have quality questions designed to target testing the areas of ability that candidates need to have. As many accounting tests have a multi-choice selection, it is also worth asking if candidates can search for the answers online.
- Check cheating precautions
Asking whether or not questions can be searched for online is directly linked to checking cheating precautions. As candidates often take pre-employment tests at home, it can make employers question whether candidates have honest results or not.
Having anti-cheating features and placing precautionary measures is one way to ensure that candidates have real results. This can be done several ways, including:
- Setting time limits to questions.
- Web proctoring.
- Auto-submission after leaving the assessment tab for a set period of time.
- Having questions and problems that cannot be googled.
While cheating can never be ruled out, precautions like these reduce the risk significantly.
Is the test candidate friendly?
Candidate friendly tests improve user experience. This is important because while assessments give insight into candidate talent, they also reflect on companies tell candidates more about the organisation.
Having good user experience also improves the test-taking rate.
Examples of how tests can be candidate friendly include:
- Keeping tests under 40 minutes. Studies have shown that tests over 40 minutes have seen a drop in their completion rate from 75% to 66%.
- Provides explanations to candidates as to why they are taking a pre-employment test and what the purpose of this is.
- Provides a place for candidate feedback.
Pre-employment accounting testing is a valuable tool for organisations to utilise in their recruiting process. Skill-based tests shortlist the top talent available by sifting out unsuitable and under qualified candidates for roles. This process also provides immense benefits such as increased retention rates, lowered hiring expenses, and objective screening.
Top points that organisations should keep in mind when looking for vendors to add an accounting test to their recruitment process include question quality, legal requirements, cheating checkers, and candidate friendly test processes.
Author Bio:
This post was contributed by Ella Moffat, a communications intern at Adaface, which provides conversational assessments for companies to find great talent.
