Hiring a remote marketing team is not an easy process. There’s just so much to consider in choosing who would make a good fit to bring on board and help you achieve company goals. Unfortunately, you can’t do it without taking this step because your team is the company’s powerhouse.
You need to bring on professionals that understand the company’s vision and objectives to ensure growth and expansion quickly. How then can you ensure that you don’t make the wrong hire?
When you’re hiring a marketing team, you put your business at risk of multiple failed marketing strategies if you bring on employees who don’t know what they’re doing. You need an effective recruiting and interviewing system that will prove your prospect hires are up to the task.
An example of such is pre-employment testing. This article will examine what it is and why every remote marketing hire needs to undergo it.
What is pre-employment testing?
Pre-employment testing is simply the tests or assessments that candidates have to take during the recruitment or onboarding process. It’s put in place to test various aspects that are necessary to rate whether they’re most fitting for the job.
Pre-employment tests can assess potential employees’ skills for the job, their personality traits, specific characteristics, cognitive abilities, and lots more. It shows their ability to carry out the role expertly if they make the cut at the end of the day.
Pre-employment tests can come at the early stages of the hiring process or be used as a screening tool at the end stages. You can use it to narrow down the number of candidates and then make a choice based on other criteria for the candidates left.
Why pre-employment testing is important for hiring remote marketing teams
If you’re looking to hire a remote marketing team, then you need to test their expertise for the job outside of conducting remote interviews. This pre-employment test offers a wide range of benefits which you will find out below.
Reduce the time spent on unqualified candidates
The average company rakes in up to 250 applications per job ad. Having to sift through this entire bunch to find a fitting candidate can take quite some time. However, with a pre-employment screening test, you can cut down the time and find a better crop of candidates who match what you need.
For instance, if you’re looking to hire Social media managers, a pre-employment test could determine how many applicants understand important features of certain social media channels.
If your preferred social media channel is Instagram, you can test to see how many candidates know how to create content for new features like Instagram Reels. This will help you discover creative and up-to-date candidates and understand what your company needs.
It also shows you candidates who don’t take the job seriously and waste your time throughout the recruitment process.
It helps you hire objectively
As humans, we all have some form of bias that may come into play during the screening and hiring process. However, when you conduct a pre-test to find out a candidate’s competence, it helps to eliminate every preexisting bias.
With the test, you can make your hiring judgments based on the candidates’ competence for the job and the level of their skills. You don’t have to hire based on your gut feeling, assumptions, shared love for something (e.g., sports), or your personal opinion.
A pre-employment test helps you to judge impartially and objectively.
It eliminates disagreements
Hiring candidates solely on personal opinions and feelings can lead to disagreements between members of the talent recruitment team. If every team member has their own preferred candidate based on their opinion, it becomes impossible to reach a consensus.
With pre-employment tests, the team can figure out who would be best to take the spot based on their performance. The talent recruitment team would not likely select candidates who score poorly in the test so that everybody would decide on a candidate in unity.
Makes remote testing seamless
Before the pandemic, some marketing roles required office-based testing to screen candidates. If the candidate was unable to come in person, this greatly reduced the number of qualified staff they could test.
However, the pandemic forced many teams to work remotely, and to fill the screening need; remote pre-employment testing became a thing. You can conduct pre-employment tests for remote hires worldwide and find out more about prospective team members; their skills, their personalities, etc. As part of these tests, one of the primary steps even before a CV can be reviewed would be to pre-assess or evaluate a candidate’s cover letter. This can save on lots of time and help to quickly decide if the candidate is suitable for consideration even before going ahead with the rest of the following pre-employment tests.
Reduces the costs of bad hires
The recruitment process, in general, is quite expensive (up to $4000 to $5000 per hire), and this includes bad hires. When you take a candidate through the entire hiring process only to discover that they are not fit for the job and would need to be replaced, it not only wastes time but also costs.
When you conduct pre-employment tests, you can eliminate potential bad hires. It narrows your search down to candidates that are among the top picks. This reduces the amount of time you spend hiring.
It also helps you cut down on the costs of hiring the wrong candidates, so you don’t waste money on hiring them or replacing them.
Keeps you safe from laws and regulations
Pre-employment tests can come in handy in protecting you from candidates looking to sue hiring teams or companies based on unfair hiring processes. Sometimes, some candidates like to invoke the law if they feel that the recruitment process is biased or unfair.
If you conduct pre-employment screening tests, you can back up your hiring decisions with the results from the test. They will provide solid evidence why you decided to go with another candidate and that the suing candidate was not qualified based on their poor performance.
This will cancel the grounds of their suit and keep your hiring team transparent and absolved of any charges.
Helps you select the best candidate even if you’re not skilled in the area
If you’re looking to hire the best marketing team but have very little knowledge of how marketing works, conducting prepared pre-employment tests can still help you make the right choice.
You can simply have a marketing expert prepare the pre-employment tests. Or,work with recruiting agencies to help you prepare the tests. This way you don’t have to prepare the test based on your own knowledge to get the best and most appropriate candidate for the job.
All that’d be left for you is to analyze the results of the test and sift through to get the most qualified candidate.
How to make the most of pre-employment tests on a remote staff
There are certain practices to follow when conducting pre-employment tests, they will help you get the best results to help you choose the best candidates for your remote marketing team.
Select the best platform
There are various pre-employment software that you can use to conduct your test. Some of them include iMocha, Tests4Geeks, EasyHire, etc. To choose the best one, you would have to weigh your options based on the needs you’re looking to settle. Some needs may include:
- How regularly you would need to conduct pre-employment tests
- The types of tests you need to carry out
- Anti-cheating measures you need to ensure transparency
- If you need to integrate the software with an ATS
- If you need customer support on the software
Choose the right tests
Your pre-employment tests will not help you make the right decision if you don’t choose the right one for your hiring needs. Ensure that the test you select is an accurate assessment of the candidate you wish to employ.
For marketing roles for instance, if you’re looking to hire an SEO analyst, conducting a Pay-Per-Click advertising test on them would not be an accurate measure of their skill.
Test your team first
Validating the results of your tests helps you to judge the accuracy and validity of candidates’ results. To do this, you can run the tests on some of your high-performing team members in that role and see how they perform.
If your top-performing team members perform poorly, it may be difficult for you to make accurate hiring decisions because you won’t be able to accurately determine which candidate performed well.
Track engagement and completion rates
Keep track of how many candidates are able to complete your tests. If a good number of candidates are finding it hard to complete or work on the test, it may be a good indication that the tests are too long or too difficult.
A good idea is to modify the length of the test or make it less difficult.
Conclusion
Conducting pre-employment tests to build your remote marketing team helps to eliminate the human error that may accompany human judgment. They also help to reduce costs that accompany bad hires, save recruitment time, and weed off unqualified candidates without hassle.
All you need is a pre-employment testing software like TestGorilla to ensure a seamless process, analyze the results, and make your choice. You can also check out the practices to follow to help you make the best of your testing phase.
