In today's extremely tight job market, businesses do not have the luxury of trial-and-error in their hiring decisions. Hiring managers need to get the right candidate on the first try because the second-best candidate will likely no longer be available by the time they realize that their hire is not succeeding. Businesses need to find ways to reduce their risk when making hires. The more that hiring managers know ahead of time about their job candidates, the better they are able to make the right hire and avoid costly mistakes. Pre-employment assessments help businesses learn more about the people they are seeking to hire and match the right people with the appropriate positions. 

Pre-employment assessments like Berke are intended to be a predictor of how an employee will perform on a specific job. There is no specific format for a pre-employment assessment. Instead, a pre-employment assessment refers generally to any type of tool or method that is used to prospectively gauge how an employee would perform if hired. There are various differ assessments that businesses can use to accomplish this. The methods can range from formal written tests to other kinds of personality or situational tests. 

Candidates will almost always look good on paper. Resumes are intended to showcase a job candidate's skills and experience in a manner that should convince the hiring manager that they are suitable for the position. However, how a candidate will perform on the job may not be apparent from the resume. In today's day and age, the references that a job candidate lists may be uneasy with giving an honest assessment of the job candidate's true nature. This is due to fears of being subjected to a lawsuit. Beyond that, any good job candidate would likely not put forward a reference who would not give the candidate a glowing endorsement for that position. 

With references and job interviews alone being insufficient to fully vet job candidates, employers need some other method to gain a sense of how employees will perform. Candidates may claim to have expertise on paper about a specific area, and they may even be able to demonstrate enough competence in response to a handful of interview questions. However, when you give candidates a detailed hard skills examination, they will be required to actually demonstrate that they have the knowledge that they claim. Hard skills tests often measure more general areas, but these tests can be tailored to include job-specific information. 

Another great example of a pre-employment assessment is the work sample test. This will enable hiring managers to see exactly how a job candidate will approach an issue or a problem that they may encounter on the job. A job candidate that can successfully complete this assessment is able to demonstrate that they really can do the job. At the same time, this test can weed out those candidates who may not be able to perform up to expectations on the job. 

Other approaches that can be categorized as pre-employment assessments are structured interviews and behavioral interviews. In the workplace, people are much more than just the sum of their experiences. People are the product of their personality traits, reactions and maturity. In other words, employees' experience operates through the filter of their personalities. These tests may help weed out job candidates who could have a negative impact on office morale by being difficult in the workplace. In a structured interview, you can get a sense of how a job candidate will react when they are under pressure or faced with a challenge with which they are not familiar. 

Hiring managers have a tremendous responsibility in any organization. In some respects, they are literally the keeper of the organization. Depending on the size of the organization, several bad hires can have an outside effect on the culture and competency. Organizations would be best served to do as much of their homework as they possible can ahead of time to ensure that all hires turn out to be good hires. Pre-employment assessments are a great way to find out more beyond what can be learned from the resume and interview.