The single greatest investment any company makes is its people. Send this article to any manager who thinks differently (you know who they are).

Employees are responsible for every part of a companies assets and untold dollars in liability. A single bad hiring choice can cost a company hundreds of thousands of dollars. Do not let this happen to your company.

Use a pre-employement screening process to make sure you are getting what you want (and pay for). Pre-employment screening takes the form of a few different processes. I’ll outline them here:

1. Resume matching process – this is where you match a resume to a well designed job posting and see how they line up. If your candidate doesn’t have a good match – don’t move to step 2.
2. Initial Interview/Phone Screen – At this phase of the game, you are basically checking for two or three things – can they hold a conversation (with relative ease), do they give you the heebie jeebies (technical terms), and are they still interested in employment. RentASmartGuy.com Phone Screening Form.
3. Any Number of Face to face interviews – The meat and potatoes of the hiring process and the one most prone to human error. There are tactics on both sides of this equation – both for the individual getting hired, and the interview techniques of the hiring manager – tactics that involve the standard spy vs. spy style conversations. In the end, most prospects win on the intangibles – style, demeanor, and trustworthiness.
4. Pre-Hiring background check and drug screening (this seems late in the game for most companies for all the wrong reasons). Spend $100 and make sure you don’t waste $500 in the interview process rather than the other way around.

Most companies stop there and don’t include any other assessments. Thus the hiring process remains a process won via social skills. Objectively, it is difficult to truly assess qualifications other than certifications and degrees. Subjectively, the only real decision you make is – do you trust the person on the other side of the table.

Testing, however, brings some of that subjective conversation into the objective domain. It allows the hiring manager to see if an individual knows the skills, or knows how to talk about them (the difference could cost millions). Other tests can also check for intellectual and emotional liabilities, and even integrity. Adding a screening assessment to your hiring process is easy.

To add an assessment, you simply need to identify an assessment that will meet your organizations needs. There are hundreds of assessments available.  Work with your hr staff, or a business coach, to work with you to select the right one.  You might also consider conducting the assessment on the leadership and management in your organization so that the purpose and value of the assessment can be experienced.

Don’t forget too, that assessments provide a great way to develop yourself and your employees.