Three years ago, a workforce-development agency in Massachusetts known as Commonwealth Corporation studied the reason for the sharp fall in youth employment rates in that state. The group’s president, Nancy Snyder, stated that pre-employment assessments were a significant obstacle.
The study reports that young applicants “are not well prepared or coached about the personality testing that is imbedded in the application process,” and that their “approach to the screening tool was much more casual than it should have been.” This doesn’t mean young applicants aren’t taking hiring seriously, they just don’t understand what types of answers employees are looking for. Snyder states that, if they understood the purpose and weight that the pre-employment assessment carried, their answers would be more thoughtful and meticulous.
Another major obstacle pre-employment assessments are causing for young applicants is that certain skills that most organizations—those studied by Commonwealth Corporation—are measuring happen to be developed through work experience. This puts the applicant in that vicious cycle that all young applicants fall victim to: you can’t get a job without experience, and you can’t get experience without a job.
With the number of young applicants joining the workforce daily, it is crucial to select a pre-employment assessment that tailors to the younger, upcoming generations.
Not only does Talexes’ suite of assessments include younger generations, it was updated into a modern pre-employment assessment through targeted millennial research. Our assessments are formatted in such a way that they can be properly interpreted by applicants of any generation, especially younger ones. Results are measured on an unbiased basis, focusing on the candidate’s strengths and weaknesses in certain fields, and compared to a distribution of acceptable scores for that role, so you can have an accurate idea of how they will perform in a position without previous work experience clouding your judgement.
Oftentimes, pre-employment assessments do not provide relevant feedback for the candidate to understand where they may have fallen short or didn’t match with the job fit. When a candidate is denied with this lack of feedback, they are spit back out into the applicant pool without any direction on what to improve, causing continual failure of the millennial hiring process. Our assessments not only provide feedback of the candidate, they also provide suggestions and guidelines for how the candidate can be improved.
The unemployment rate of young workers was 17.5 percent last year—and it’ll continue growing if hiring obstacles aren’t knocked down. Get the right assessment for your organization’s hiring success, and don’t leave out the younger generations.
For more insight on the ideal pre-employment assessment for all generations, contact Talexes today!
