News > Headlines
Recruiting Strategies: Assessing Candidates' Intelligence
Before making your final hiring decision, you need to ensure your new hire can fulfill all the job requirements AND has enough intelligence to perform the job. Your goal should be to determine which candidates will be fantastic employees who are productive, profitable and dependable. Aim to hire the best. To succeed in doing so, I recommend pre-employment testing, to help you identify the candidates who rate as high as your current best performers.
It is often difficult to locate job applicants who do well on pre-employment tests, excel in the interview and have excellent references. But, it is even more difficult, more time-consuming and more expensive if you forgo this step and hire a second-rate employee who does not have enough intelligence to at least be an equal performer to your best employees.
The easiest way to predict an applicant's brainpower is to have them take mental ability tests. There are a multitude of tests available....just search online for "pre-employment testing" and you will have plenty to choose from!
In general, I've found five crucial mental abilities the tests should measure:
- Problem-Solving
- Vocabulary
- Arithmetic
- Grammar, Spelling & Word Use
- Handling Small Details
In fact, large-scale meta-analytic research on hiring methods found that mental abilities tests had the highest correlation for correctly predicting if an applicant can do a good job. Behavior tests also predict well, according to the research. So, an efficient way to help you hire the best is to have applicants answer both mental abilities and behavior tests. You also can add an additional job skills evaluation method called work simulations, which some companies swear by.
Regardless of the exact approach, your best bet is to require your present employees to take the tests, record how your best performers score and use those scores as a benchmark for hiring future employees. After all, you want to hire applicants who will continue bringing your company up to the next level...not simply maintaining the status quo or falling backwards. And don't fall into the trap of using "national norms" as benchmarks, because these people may not be top performers. Remember, you want to create a talent pool of exceptional employees to ensure the success of the entire team.
Source: Dr. Michael Mercer, Keynote Speaker and Management and Leadership Expert
