Modern University for Technology & Information

Faculty of Management

Research Paper

Student and Course Information

Student Name: Islam Mokhtar Abdel Hafez Atia
Student Code: 83092
Course Code: FIN312en
Course Name: Human Resources Management

Research Tit

(Employee Testing and Selection)

Spring 2020
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 Introduction

In any employee hiring procedure, employers are collecting as much ideas and information about
the candidates as they can. There is an issue that traditional methods of understating and knowing
candidate usually don't result in the best prediction. A good and well selected tests are reliable
and effective ways to collect information from the job applicants

Companies that use pre-employment testing can see a noticeable and positive impact on their
business. In this research we will study basic techniques that used for testing and employee
selection employee performance in different kinds of job types and careers and why the a
well developed and professional pre-employment test can help the firm predict the
capabilities and the behavior of the employee and how it can help the business to succeed.
The most accurate way of predicting performance about applicants is test because they can
effectively determine how much skills, abilities, and competency to does this human have for
any given job. For different types of the business there are pre-employment assessments that
being used in companies and commercial firms.

Many companies use professional hiring-process plan to ease the selection process and result in a
long-term permanence of the employee. Companies also use tests to determine the training needs
of individuals, departments, sections, teams and so on. Employees with the right skills will do a
better job for you and for the company. Employees without the needed skills or who are not
professional enough will not perform effectively, and your own performance and the firms will
suffer.

Well-designed and professionally validated tests are a reliable and objective way of assessing
candidates, they also provide concrete results that can be standardized across all applicants.
Recruiters can use test results to make better informed and more defensible hiring decisions. The
use of pre-employment test and assessment by both large and small companies is significantly
increasing year by year.

1 -Why Pre-employment Testing and Assessment should be used?

Its more objective

Rely on objective data to make better hiring decisions. Pre-employment tests can provide you
with standardized, useful insights on candidates and predict job performance and company fit. By

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using this data to identify and hire the right candidate you’ll also improve overall productivity
and effectiveness of your teams.

It increases employee retention

Employees that aren’t the right fit for a job will eventually underperform in terms of engagement
with the role and productivity and, thus, are more likely to leave. And as you well know,
replacing a bad hire can be very expensive and time-consuming. But pre-employment testing and
assessment can reduce costs on hiring and training costs by providing you with data that will help
you hire the right people for a position the first time

To assess if candidates are fit for a position, there are many factors that can be considered such as
passion for learning; overall ambition; ownership and initiative; empathy; communication skills;
critical thinking skills; collaboration skills; honesty; motivation; curiosity; etc. Screening for
these skills during a standard face-to-face interview can be really difficult.

. As important as hiring the right candidate, it’s crucial for companies to retain talent and reduce
turnover. With pre-employment testing and assessment, you can screen candidates more
efficiently for aptitude and personality and assess whether a candidate is likely to stay in the role
and fit in with the company culture

It increases the legacy of the firm

Contrary to what people normally think, pre-employment testing and assessment can increase the
legal defensibility of your hiring process, when used correctly. The use of pre-employment
testing and assessment has to follow the same guidelines as any other hiring selection method
(including resumes, interviews, etc.)

These guidelines state that pre-employment tests and assessments are completely legal to use as
long as they are job-related. Tests have an additional layer of legal defensibility due to the fact
that they provide employers with objective, scientifically validated predictors of success in a job,
in opposition to other subjective hiring methods. These actually gives companies a chance to
better defend their hiring procedures if someone questions their hiring process legality.

Assessing a wider range of skills

pre-employment testing allows you to assess a wide range of applicable skills and personality
traits. It allows you to assess various characteristics of the candidate such as: cognitive ability,
strategic thinking, subject-area knowledge, confidence, problem solving ability, leadership
ability, agreeableness, organizational skills, helpfulness, analytical skills, risk-taking,
productivity, initiative, honesty, people-skills, reliability, positivity, empathy, collaboration, etc.

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2- The basic Benefits of Pre-Employment Testing
Pre-employment tests provide a wide range of benefits that not only ease the hiring process, but
also strengthen an entire organization by increasing the likelihood that new employees will be
successful in their positions. Pre-employment testing can help ensure alignment between the
employee selection process and desired business outcomes such as lower turnover, increased
sales, and higher customer satisfaction. The most significant benefits a company may experience

by implementing an effective employee testing solution include:

Higher productivity
Increased employee retention and reduction in costs associated with turnover (e.g., hiring and
training costs)
More efficient, less time-consuming hiring process
Increased defensibility of the hiring process through the use of objective, validated metric

Higher Productivity
Research demonstrates that professionally developed, well-validated pre-employment tests can
successfully predict employee productivity across a wide range of job types and industries. Tests
are among the most accurate means of predicting performance because they can objectively
determine the extent to which a candidate has the knowledge, skills, and abilities to perform well
at any given job.

Consider the case of a clothing retailer that sought to improve the productivity (as measured by
hourly sales volume) of its sales associates. They gave their current employees the Criteria Basic
Skills Test (CBST), which measures basic math, verbal, and communication skills, as well as
attention to detail. By examining the relationship between test scores and average sales per hour,
the company was able to determine that employees who achieved high scores on the test sold, on
average, $98.02 of goods per hour, while those who received low test scores sold only $81.45 per
hour. In other words, those salespeople who passed the test were on average 20% more
productive than those who didn't. When correlations between test results and various desirable
business outcomes -- including productivity, retention rates, customer satisfaction ratings, and
training expenses - can be linked to each other in a data-driven way, it is relatively simple to
demonstrate the dramatic Return on Investment (ROI) of employee testing.

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Figure(1) Employees who achieved high scores on the CBST sold, on average, $98.02 of goods
per hour, compared to $81.45 for those that received low scores

Increased Employee Retention and Reduction in Costs Associated with

Turnover

Pre-employment testing can increase employee retention by ensuring that new employees have
the basic aptitude required for the job along with the appropriate temperament, or personality, to
feel comfortable with the type of work required of them. These factors may reduce the likelihood
of employees being let go for performing poorly or not successfully completing training
(involuntary turnover) as well as the likelihood that employees will quit of their own accord
(voluntary turnover).

One example demonstrating the value of pre-employment tests as a means of reducing turnover is
provided by the case of a call center in the financial services industry. Like many call centers,
employee retention represented a significant business challenge, so the company decided to
administer the Criteria Basic Skills Test to all new hires and then analyze the relationship
between test scores and retention rates after six months. What they found was that the employees
with higher test scores were both less likely to be fired and less likely to quit. The 6-month
retention rate for low scoring employees was 56%, while the rate for high scoring employees was
67%.

Reducing turnover can have wide-ranging benefits that ripple through an entire organization.
Lower turnover rates boost employee morale and elevate a company's reputation externally,
which in turn makes it easier for a company to attract and hire better quality candidates.
Reducing turnover also leads to more concrete benefits to a company's bottom line. Some of the
expenses associated with replacing an employee include recruitment, selection, training, and
occasionally severance pay for the departing employee. One study estimates that replacing entry
level employees costs about 16% of their annual salary, and this number increases even more for
higher-paid positions – to replace mid-level employees, it costs about 20% of their annual salary,
and to replace high-level executive employees, it could cost over 200%. As a result, there is clear
incentive for companies to find ways to reduce turnover in their employees.
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More Efficient, Less Time-Consuming Hiring Process

The recruiting process can be incredibly time-consuming – it typically takes about 45 days to fill
a new position. However, for jobs that are posted online, nearly 50% remain open for more than
90 days. This is not due to a lack of applicants – an average of 250 resumes are submitted for
each online posting, and our own data suggests that the average size of applicant pools for each
open position more than doubled from 2009 to 2015. Rapidly growing applicant pools are
making it increasingly difficult for recruiters to manage applicant flow and identify the right
candidates within a sea of resumes. Including pre-employment tests in the hiring process can
dramatically streamline this process.

Pre-employment tests offer the most time-saving value when administered at the top of the hiring
funnel. By requiring that applicants take the tests early on, companies can weed out a lot of the
"resume spammers" who send out their resumes with minimal thought or effort. The applicants
who end up completing the tests are, at the very least, serious enough about the position to put in
the time to take the tests.

Moreover, setting minimum cutoff scores for certain tests can quickly narrow down the number
of applicants to select for phone or in-person interviews. Reducing the time spent on the
interview process drastically reduces the overall time spent recruiting employees - research
indicates that the average recruiter spends nearly 63% of his or her time on the phone per week.
Meanwhile, in-person interviews last an average of 40 minutes. Pre-employment tests limit the
hours spent on time-consuming recruiting activities by making it easier to discover the right
candidates with the most potential for success on the job

Increased Defensibility in the Hiring Process

Besides helping a company realize improvements in various business outcomes, pre-employment

testing can also enhance the objectivity, equitability, and legal defensibility of an organization's
hiring process. All companies should strive to utilize equitable and legally compliant employee
selection and promotion practices. Pre-employment tests are governed by federal guidelines
intended to ensure equitable and non-discriminatory hiring practices. Because of this, some
companies believe that utilizing employment tests increases a company's legal exposure.
However, the same guidelines that govern pre-employment testing govern all selection
methodologies used by employers. While employers should be aware of the legal compliance
issues surrounding employment testing, it is important to realize that employment testing can
actually augment legal defensibility by enhancing the objectivity of a company's employee
selection procedures. Organizations that implement testing programs in accordance with legal
guidelines are therefore better prepared to defend these procedures in the unlikely event that a
legal challenge to their hiring practices should ever arise.

Identifying right kind of competency

Tests could help identify people with the right kind of competencies required to do a job in an
efficient and effective manner. Of course, to avoid wide spread criticisms of various kinds, it is

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always a prudent way to deploy only professionally developed and properly validated
employment tests.

3- The Criteria of The Selection Tests

It must be validated
That is, the test must measure what it says it is measuring.

 It must be reliable
Meaning the results must be consistently repeatable. Reliability is often a problem with
interviews, where it is not uncommon for two interviewers to get different responses to the same
questions, depending on the interviewer’s ability to both probe and interpret the responses or the
effect of the setting in which the interview is given.

Must be job relevant and job specific

Professionally developed and properly validated Employment tests can help a company’s hiring
process by increasing the likelihood of hiring candidates who will perform well on the job. Pre-
employment testing can help ensure alignment between the employee selection process and
desired business outcomes such as lower turnover, increased sales, improved employee morale
and higher customer satisfaction.

4-Important Types Used in Business for the Selection of Personnel

Intelligence Tests:

These tests are used to judge the mental capacity of the applicants. They measure the individual
learning abilities, i.e., ability to catch or understand instructions and also ability to make decision
and judgement.

There are many verbal as well as non-verbal intelligence tests constructed by the psychologists
for different jobs. Intelligence tests are widely used in the selection of personnel for almost every
kind of job from the unskilled to the skilled one.

Aptitude Tests:

Aptitude means the potential which an individual has for learning the skills required to do a job
efficiently. Aptitude tests measure an applicant’s capacity and his potential for development.
Aptitude tests are the most promising indices for predicting candidate’s success.

There are two types of aptitude tests:

(a) Cognitive Test which measures mental and intellectual aptitudes, and
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(b) Motor Test which measures physical dimensions such as manual dexterity or hand-eye
coordination.

Proficiency Tests:

Proficiency tests are those which are designed to measure the skills already acquired by the
individuals. They are also known as performance, occupational or trade tests. They are used to
test the level of knowledge and proficiency acquired by the applicants.

A trade test takes a sample of individual’s behaviour which is designed as replica of the actual
work situation. A trade test should be differentiated from an aptitude test. An aptitude test
measures the potential of the applicant to learn skills required on a job.

Interest Tests:
Interest tests identify patterns of interests, i.e., areas in which the individual shows
special concern, fascination and involvement. These tests will suggest what types
of jobs may be satisfying to the employees. Interest tests are more often used for
vocational guidance also. They help the individuals in selecting occupations of
their interest.

Personality Tests

Personality tests probe the qualities of an individual’s personality as a whole, the combination of
aptitude, interest and usual mood and temperament. It is very difficult to devise and use
personality tests because they are concerned with discovering clues to an individual’s value
system, his emotional reactions, maturity, etc.

5-Importance of Employment tests

Employment tests have become widely accepted in the selection process. The real value of the
tests lies in eliminating those applicants who have very little chance of job success than in
selecting applicants who will definitely be successful on the jobs. It should be remembered that
when the tests are used, they should not be relied upon completely. It is advisable to often tools
also like interviewing, reference checking, etc.

Tests can help to uncover talent that may otherwise be over-looked and to differentiate between
the ability required for the present job and that required for the new jobs. Another advantage is
that a great deal of information about a person’s competence can be known by using tests.

Tests reduce the costs of selection and placement because a large number of applicants can be
evaluated within a short period of time. If an employer expects to continue in a competitive

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business, the costs of hiring and the costs of training must be kept to a minimum. Psychological
tests can reduce the costs of hiring people who will be successful by measuring their aptitude and
predicting their success

6-Stages Selecting Employees

Analyse Employment

decisions should aim to support the achievement of the Department’s vision and objectives. Job
analysis is a systematic examination of the purpose, responsibilities and scope of a position in
supporting business objectives. It can help you to assess whether a position is required and what you
wish to achieve in filling it. The hiring manager prepares for the recruitment process by considering
current and future staffing needs, undertaking a job analysis and developing a position description.

Attract
In attracting applicants to a role, it is important to promote the Department as a great place to work
which stands out from the competition. Our objective is to attract applicants who want to work in the
public sector and who understand the Department’s values. Consider leveraging social media and the
Department’s online presence to attractjob seekers and show that the Department offers competitive
benefits, a great work culture and room for professional growth. Attraction includes the following
steps: determine application requirements in advertisements, advertise to attract diverse applicants,
engage and attract prospective applicants and plan the selection process.

Assess and select

When determining assessment and selection methods, it is important to know your audience. Make
sure you have a robust approach that will enable you to effectively differentiate between prospective
applicants and assess their suitability for a role with the Department. At the same time, any biases
should be eliminated. When selecting an applicant, negotiation is a critical part of the recruitment
process. This section of the Guide includes practical tips on negotiating with preferred applicants

On-board and evaluate

Once the offer of employment has been formally accepted, it is time to on-board the new employee.
On-boarding refers to the procedures and actions to effectively integrate a new employee into an
organization. It is important to start the engagement positively –effective on-boarding has a
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significant impact on employee productivity, retention and safety. A smooth on-boarding process
gives a good first impression of the Department and helps the employee adapt more quickly to their
new job

7-Some of the Challenges of Recruitment and Selection of Employees

Over qualification syndrome
The high level of unemployment in the country has not only resulted in brain drain but also
in the presence of over qualified people. The labour market may be flooded with highly
qualified and experienced people chasing few jobs. Job shortages have resulted in
applicants accepting any job that come their way. As a result, as soon as the candidate
gets a better job they quit resulting in a high labour turnover. The company will then be
obliged to go through another recruitment and selection process.

Geographical location of a company

Geographical location of a company may pause recruitment challenges in cases where the
company is located very far away from city centres. The pool of employees can be limited.
Potentially qualified and experienced people may not want to be relocated to places far away
from their families unless they can take their families with them.

Change in business model

A change in an organization’s business model may also pose challenges for recruitment.
Upon establishment a company might have needed more unskilled labour. As the company
develops its demands for unskilled labour may be reduced and the right pool of employees
that suits the new business model might not be available in the area

Political interference
Government controlled companies such as parastatals also face challenges of recruitment.
Political polarisation has spilled over into companies. It became obvious during the research
that sometimes politicians may influence the recruitment and selection process by referring
candidates for appointment to vacant positions. The Human resources managers usually
comply for fear of losing their jobs. Sometimes these results in the company appointing under
qualified personnel at the expense of qualified and experienced people. Just like nepotism,
political interference has led to organizations appointing people on the basis of their political
affiliation, a challenge which prospective employees face. Because of the political
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polarisation in the country between the major political parties, human resources managers
experience a dilemma as from which political background should employees be selected

Outdated /inadequate job descriptions

Technological changes are moving at a very fast speed. Technological changes may affect
how a job is done and the specifications required for that job may also change. This has
implications on recruitment and selection as the job description of the vacant position might
be outdated or inadequate. A review of the vacant position’s job description must be done in
order to ensure relevance of the job requirements and specifications. There might be
situations where a company is venturing into a new industry and new jobs are created. This
means that there may be no frame of reference for creating new job descriptions in such
circumstances. The company might not have knowledge of the background and experience
required for new jobs. The selection process becomes a trial and error one

8-Importance of Managing the Recruitment and Selection Process

The recruitment and selection process helps the organization in a number of ways. The whole
purpose of recruitment and selection process is for the organization to find people who will
be a perfect match to the jobs for which they will be employed and thereby ensuring that, as
much as possible, the organization will be staffed with the right people with the right skills,
knowledge, experiences and competences at the right time. The recruitment and selection
process helps the organization in making realistic decisions about a prospective candidate.

It also provides the organization with the knowledge of sources of potential recruits. As part
of the human resources planning system, the recruitment and selection process helps the
organization in determining its future human resources requirements and its ability to meet its
objectives in view of the work systems and technology in use. It is important for an
organization to write accurate job descriptions before a vacancy is advertised.

This ensures that precedence is given to the competencies that would make the most positive
contribution to the achievement of the company’s objectives. If done properly the recruitment
and selection process can attract good candidates and can provide the organization with
useful indicators for future performance.
A good recruitment and selection process ensures conformity to legal requirements as
dictated by the Labour Relations Act. The process should be transparent and should ensure
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privacy and observance of equal opportunity legislation. The process therefore ensures that
the selection process is fair and meets legal requirements. A good recruitment and selection
policy ensures consistency in hiring staff and reduces the risk of bias or discrimination.
Consequently, a good recruitment and selection process ensures that administrative
procedures are handled efficiently

Conclusion
Its
In this study we have discussed diffent elemnt that are part of the process of emplyee
testing and selection, we have also mentioned the iportnce of this process and why

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