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« The Utility of Unproctored, Internet-Based Testing | Main | Patent on Online Testing to be Re-examined »
Front loading testing into the applicant tracking process
On May 18, 2006 by Jamie Madigan
Okay, last post about a specific program I saw at this year's SIOP conference. This one was kind of interesting, though, because it dealt with a process that seems to me like it should be a lot more common than it is. In "Cutting Edge Selection: Turning Applicant Tracking into Talent Acquisition," several companies talked about how they had front loaded one kind of testing or another into the application process. In other words, they immediately tested people through the Internet as part of the online application process. No screening, no scheduling, just WHAM! You've been tested.
I've often wondered why more companies don't do this. For tests that are valid across a wide variety of jobs (e.g., cognitive ability tests and to a more debatable degree, some personality scales), you could just have everybody take them as part of the application. (See last week's post on unproctored testing for thoughts on how to deal with cheating.) You don't even have to score them, but you'll have them on file and ready to go when you want. The same could be said for job-specific tests if you have a job with lots of applicant flow. The presenters at the SIOP symposium talked about how they used minimum job qualifications and situational judgment tests, but it could really be done with almost any test amenable to the web.
I guess there would be some reasons to be careful about this --if you use a vendor's test and have to pay per administration then it could rack up pretty quickly, for example. And you'd need to think through what implications this has for your EEO statistics, especially since including tests earlier in your application process can increase adverse impact if test-takers would have otherwise been screened out. And these presenters were folks who were drowning in resumes --one of them reported getting fifty thousand resumes per month. But if your applicant pool is big enough and you own the tests so you're just pushing bits around, then why not include a test of reasonable length right up front?
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