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Pre-employment Questionnaire - How to be Successful in Attracting the Best Talents

Hiring candidates have always been a tiresome job. Although there are many HRM functions, finding a suitable hire is what HR always thinks of, but it is not sure whether the candidate on the opposite side may be fruitful for the company. The outlook of the candidates must be analyzed throughout the interview process. However, there is a limited amount of time to observe them; with proper practices in hand, you are not too far. One best thing is to create a pre-employment checklist that includes a pre-employment questionnaire you need to ask the candidates.

To be more generous, try to ask for information related to education and past employment. It also helps in double tick the data written in resumes. Thus pre-employment questionnaires will open up the qualifications of the employees, putting brakes on time-consuming processes.

But what questions to ask? How to determine if those questions are worthy? Well, here the need and benefits of the Pre-Employment questionnaire.

What is a Pre-Employment Questionnaire?

A pre-employment questionnaire is a screening technique used prior to scheduling interviews with candidates. It gives the exact idea if the candidate is the best fit for your company from a larger pool of applicants. The employer can save a significant amount of time in the interview process.

A pre-employment questionnaire is a set of questions that an employer wants to ask the applicants. You can analyze whether they have made mistakes in representing themselves. Moreover, the background checks you do will be more helpful in such analysis.

This questionnaire can be in the form of digital and manual formats.

For example, calling them at the office for the same purpose can be a little more time-consuming, and you may receive similar information they have presented through their resume. It might become hard to make up further decisions.

On the other hand, choosing a digital way to prepare the forms can be made using Google forms or other such tools and share them through emails. Moreover, the responses can be automatically recorded into the Google spreadsheets for more effective processing. It becomes easy to take such tests without even calling them to the office.

Why is the Pre Interview Questionnaire needed?

A pre interview questionnaire speaks a lot about the candidates, their communication and technical skills, even the flaws.

Finding whether your candidate is genuinely representing their data is again an important aspect of the determination of a perfect candidate.

Moreover, it is the major role of any employer to establish an environment of work that improves productivity and not degrade the progress of the company. Thus identifying candidates’ behaviour and interaction plays an essential role in enhancing business ethics. After that, with the information of every candidate in hand, you can set up interviews and assessments for the picked candidates very genuinely.

Thus pre-employment questionnaire helps in choosing the trustworthy and truthful candidate for your company.

What to Include in the Pre-employment Questionnaire?

Now that you know why a pre-employment questionnaire is a required perk to include as the fundamental tool in the interview process, it is also essential to know how to use it and what is to be included in such questions.

This is the high time when you decide how to weed out the non-profitable candidates at the primary stage only. But now the question is what to question them.

Such questions can include personality checks, behavioural levels, technical skills, cognitive ability, dilemma questions, and many more to go. Here are some of the sample questions that can be asked during the Pre-employment Questionnaire.

• What will you do after the arousal of a conflict between you and your co-worker?
• What will you do if you are not able to contact your client because of some essential task going on?
• How would you rate your logical skills on a scale of 1-10?
• What can you suggest making the working environment more fun?
• What if your co-worker’s thought on a topic doesn’t match with you?
• How would you describe your professional behaviour?
• Where do you see yourself in the subsequent five years?
• How much experience do you have in this field?
• Why did you leave your previous job?
• What would you do if two of your superior’s scenarios don’t match on a single topic?

How the Pre-employment Questionnaire Benefits the Employer?

Just like a normal person’s mind, you must have thought that why to add one additional step in the recruitment management process, unless it definitely benefits you. But you may never know some processes’ benefits without using them. If not a detailed review, but applying this step to the function will offer you something more deep into the knowledge of candidates. That’s enough for the prior stages. Once you know what questions to ask, you may get benefited from the removal of some bad hires.

So here are the fundamental benefits of a pre-employment questionnaire that one can leverage.

1. Improves Hiring Quality

Rather than foraging the resumes for a longer time and finding nothing, it is better to have an extra option to continue the process.

A pre-employment questionnaire helps in narrowing down the long list of candidates based on what you ask them. For example, you can squeeze down the list based on qualifications, cognitive thinking, general thoughts about work, behaviour, and if you need you can add various criteria up to your company’s core values. Thus improving the quality of candidates, you recruit.

2. Identifying Qualifications

When you gather questions for the questionnaire round, you must know what to ask and how to collect the exact information needed. Once you are habituated to this process, it will be easy to include questions that answer the qualifications and technical ability of the candidates. Because you never know how much of the resume data is accurate and it may not be good for your company environment.

3. Identifying the Key Qualities

Employees in the field of managerial and technical tasks must have some extra ability to handle various tasks and think differently. Thus entailing such kinds of questions where candidates need to show their thinking capacity can be of much help in identifying key qualities of your applicants.

4. Analyzing Candidate Behaviour

Since behaviour is the most important to establish in an expanding working environment, along with employee loyalty, developing interactiveness and communicative skills can be your target. Such analysis can help you in maintaining and improving the working atmosphere where employees are more generous and skilled because more than 38% of the employees struggle to communicate with employees of different age groups.

5. Time-Saving

Whatever process you use, until it does not save you time compared to the previous one, it may not be that useful for a longer time. Above all the benefits included above, the pre-employment questionnaire helps in distinguishing your candidates, thus reducing the number of hires in an early stage. However, it is not necessary that your candidate count is reduced.

Other than this, when such rounds offer you answers to many of your questions, you don’t have to spend much time asking those questions in other rounds.

Current Trends In Hiring Top Talents From The Vast Pool

• Among the huge variety of pre-employment tests, around 70% of employers undertake job skill tests, 46% take personality tests, and 41% prefer to take basic literacy and math tests.
• Nearly 76% of the recruiting team says that attracting the top talents is a very strenuous job.
• For soft skill evaluation, approximately 75% of the organizations ask behavioral questions in interviews.
• Due to the complexity of the employment application, nearly 60% of the candidates have left filling it.
• Around 27% of the employers consider the lack of interpersonal aptitude or job skills in the applicants.
• For examining applicant’s resumes, recruiters hardly need 6 seconds to go through it.
• Recruitment managers who consider pre-employment tests experience around 39% lower turnover rate and 36% greater satisfaction while hiring.
• Companies using pre-employment assessments are 24% more likely to hire employees who exceed performance goals.

Summing it up

Now when you are aware of the benefits the pre-employment questionnaire offers, you can use that efficiently with your recruitment functions to reduce the time in picking the best and giving more time how to attract more range of candidates. But it is up to you to continue with it. It may happen that sometimes you don’t receive the expected results and drop off the idea. But that’s not always the case. Try improvising the process with whatever you can; the actual result can be a little bit far.

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