Hiring glossary
What is a pre-hire assessment?
A pre-hire assessment is any structured test or exercise an employer asks applicants to complete before a hiring decision, to measure job-relevant skills, abilities or behaviour in the same way for everyone.
The term covers many formats: skills tests, work samples and job simulations, cognitive ability tests, situational judgement tests, personality questionnaires and recorded interviews. They usually come early, after the application and before interviews, so the hiring team can decide who gets interview time on evidence beyond the résumé.
Three questions are worth asking of any pre-hire assessment. Does it measure something the job requires? Does every candidate get the same conditions and scoring? Is there evidence that scores relate to performance in the role? In the US, the Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures set out how an employer can show a selection procedure is valid.
Also called: pre-employment assessment, pre-employment test, hiring assessment.
Example
Applicants for a bookkeeping role receive a link after applying. They spend 30 minutes categorising transactions and reconciling a short bank statement, and the ten highest scorers are invited to interview.
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