High-volume hiring happens all the time for customer-facing roles, so soft skills like customer service, empathy, and communication are top priorities when evaluating candidates. Whether you’re filling essential positions for a call center, retail sales, patient care, or another need, pre-employment assessments can ensure you bring only qualified candidates forward in your hiring process and move quickly enough to capture high-performing talent.
Deploy pre-employment assessments earlier in volume hiring
One strategy for more effectively using pre-employment assessments for volume hiring is integrating them earlier in your workflow. With automated pre-hire assessments combined with on-demand interviews, you can efficiently evaluate an entire applicant pool, knowing you aren’t missing talent and only advancing qualified candidates. The automation solves the challenges of volume hiring with speed, efficiency, and the capability to provide all candidates with a consistent, personal hiring experience.
Job simulation pre-employment assessments like Modern Hire Virtual Job Tryouts® can be deployed very close to the front end of hiring. They are proven to predict candidates’ future success in specific roles by evaluating critical performance drivers. For example, Virtual Job Tryouts customized for Walmart’s Retail Associate position report on customer service, reliability, manages priorities, and pursues excellence. Walmart has used Modern Hire pre-employment assessments to fast-track volume hiring of hundreds of thousands of retail associates in this past year.
An essential benefit of job simulation pre-employment assessments is that they help candidates decide for themselves if they are a good fit for the role. As candidates try out job simulations and see a realistic job preview, they often become more excited about the job possibilities or quickly see that the role is not for them.
Scaling volume hiring with automation
Choosing pre-employment assessments that are part of an all-in-one, automated hiring platform gives recruiters the ability to scale to volume hiring. This type of platform expedites the process for hiring teams and candidates with automation such as:
- On-demand text screening that checks candidate responses against basic job requirements and auto-advances qualified applicants
- Auto-scoring of candidate responses to open-ended assessment and interview questions
- Self-scheduling tools that sync with hiring teams’ calendars and offer candidates their choice of interview times
The automation of pre-employment assessments help you get through your candidate pool in a meaningful way, and it helps mitigate potential bottlenecks by automatically advancing qualified candidates. A point solution for pre-employment assessments can be detrimental to the hiring experience if it delivers too many eligible candidates for a small recruiting team to move efficiently to the next step.
Another advantage is higher candidate completion rates. Modern Hire research into applicant dropout indicates the highest pre-employment assessment completion rates are achieved with all-in-one hiring experiences when all the parts of the process can be handled seamlessly and in one session for a candidate.
Here’s what an automated hiring workflow with pre-employment assessments could look like for volume hiring.
Modern Hire Hiring Blueprints are recommended, ready-to-go hiring templates predictive of success in more than 40 specific roles. They integrate Virtual Job Tryouts and other automated tools to provide workflows that scale for volume hiring.
How Royal Bank of Canada automated volume hiring
Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) transformed its volume hiring process with Modern Hire’s all-in-one platform. Each year, RBC hires 2,000 graduating students for positions ranging from analysts to developers to data scientists. Its CPA Pre-Approved Program receives about 800 applications for just six spots. RBC’s team needed a better way to keep the hiring process moving while also evaluating candidates’ soft skills. Strong candidate selection is mission-critical since this program is designed to develop future leaders within RBC.
Before partnering with Modern Hire, RBC had a four-stage hiring process, including application review, two stages of phone interviews, and the last round in-person interview day. Now applicants start with a text interview. Qualified candidates then automatically receive an invitation to complete an on-demand video interview. From there, RBC uses Modern Hire’s automated scheduling solution to schedule phone interviews with qualified candidates.
Lauren Flack, Senior Manager of Leadership Development for RBC notes, “We know today’s modern candidate is expecting an efficient and streamlined process, especially when you’re talking about the Gen Z candidates we’re targeting. Also, it’s important that we set RBC apart as a brand, and one way to do that is to showcase our dedication to innovation and the candidate experience.” Get the details of this hiring success story.
Focus on pre-employment assessments in technology selection
When evaluating automated hiring platforms, it’s essential to take a deep dive into the science behind the pre-employment assessments. With volume hiring, every issue is magnified. The selection science used (or not used) and how AI techniques are applied will impact the candidate’s experience with your organization. Do the assessments allow candidates to demonstrate job-relevant competencies? Can they be completed on a mobile device? Does the experience provide candidates with an insight into the role and your culture? Ask all of these questions as you explore technology options.
Selection science and AI use will also influence the presence or absence of bias in your hiring process. Pre-employment assessments must be rigorously vetted. When they’re used with thousands or perhaps hundreds of thousands of candidates, the right pre-employment assessments can ensure you’re hiring the most diverse, engaged, and qualified candidates at scale.
