Pre-Employment Screenings: The Employee Experience Matters

Brett Reasoner, Director of Talent Acquisition & Experience at PCL

As the world continues to evolve with new generations entering the workforce, corporations need to continue to innovate how they recruit and, ultimately, how they hire candidates in this new era. This includes not only how you interact with the candidates throughout the process but how you evaluate, offer, hire, and onboard them. Pre-employment screenings have evolved over the years from just reference checks to drug screens, written evaluations, competency tests, personality assessments and more.

They all have a specific purpose and a time for them to be implemented, but I find the most impactful pre-employment screening tools to be personality assessments and trait-based interviewing questions. Personality assessments allow us to determine how the candidates are best managed, how they communicate and learn, and how they, in turn, manage or mentor others. This allows us to create a customizable employee experience that sets each individual employee up for success. Sharing these results with their direct supervisors allows them to understand their new employees and build relationships faster and more effectively.

There are many personality assessments out there depending on your organizational goals. PCL uses Predictive Index for our personality assessments and leans on these results in a variety of ways. Using these assessments as a learning and development tool for our future leaders helps them look inward and understand themselves better, helping them recognize how to interact better with team members and their direct reports.

I believe there is a difference between someone performing the job at a high level and someone willing to perform the job at a high level. I call it the ‘can do vs. will do' assessment. Previous experience performing these tasks or project experience on a resume tells me they have performed these tasks in the past and can potentially do it again. However, trait-based interview questions allow me to dig deeper into their soft skills to uncover skills like drive, resourcefulness, accountability, and character to determine the likelihood of them repeating those successes. Creating specific interview questions involving their soft traits allows for more natural interaction and conversation versus the yes and no answers typically associated with interviewing questions.

When you near the end of the interview process, employers typically want the candidate to ‘prove it’ regarding their experience and background, which is where pre-employment screenings come into play. These types of assessments tend to give companies a higher level of comfort when making hiring decisions.

" Being creative about when to implement pre-employment screenings and assessments are essential to a quality candidate experience "

Time kills all deals – this adage is still very pertinent in this current hiring landscape. Adding steps to the process can delay the hiring of a candidate, which can ultimately lead to them taking another job before you can make an offer. Candidates are interviewing more places than ever before, with more opportunities being presented to them daily. It is imperative to keep the interview process to three weeks or less. Being creative about when to implement pre-employment screenings and assessments is essential to a quality candidate experience.

A great candidate experience is one of the two most important things to focus on when recruiting in this market. Limiting the interview process to two to three interviews max and one or two assessments or pre-employment screenings is vital to be able to compete for talent and keep the candidate engaged with your brand.

I encourage companies to consider which type of assessments have the greatest impact on their hiring decisions while focusing on the candidate experience. Tasks that take less than five minutes are often well received by candidates.

Finding the right talent is becoming more challenging in almost every market and whatever you can do as an organization to elevate yourself as a candidate-and-employee-focused brand will help you consistently recruit the best talent. 

Pre-Employment Screening