In the war for top talent, cognitive ability tests are a key differentiator for recruiters and hiring managers alike. Why? For this reason, firms who utilize a cognitive test for recruiting perceive improved employee performance and productivity as well as lower attrition, and considerable cost savings.
That’s because cognitive ability tests look at a candidate’s mental faculties, bringing to light talents that could otherwise go unnoticed on a resume or cover letter.
Using these questions, you may find out whether a candidate is able to think abstractly. Why are they so good at learning new things? How rapidly can they absorb new information? And how readily are they able to change with the times?
Recruiters make an effort, although it’s not always possible, to evaluate these qualities during the interview process. We can make the recruiting process more transparent by evaluating a candidate’s cognitive ability upfront.
Here you’ll find all you need to know about administering cognitive ability tests throughout the hiring process:
What is the purpose of a cognitive ability test, and how is it administered?
Candidates’ aptitude test abilities are assessed by a pre-employment cognitive ability exam. These exams are part of an increasing number of screening tests that not only identify superior applicants but also speed up and simplify the recruiting process.
What is the purpose of a cognitive ability exam?
Cognitive ability exams evaluate a candidate’s mental aptitude in a variety of areas.These exams don’t assess your knowledge so much as your cognitive abilities. Cognitive capacity tests, taken literally, are meant to assess things like:
- What degree of detail-oriented processing can you expect from the candidates?
- Problem solving: How effectively does a candidate utilize information to make proper decisions?
- The ability to answer logical issues and think analytically is a crucial part of the job application process.
- A candidate’s ability to work with and understand numbers is measured using the numeric reasoning test.
- Examines a candidate’s ability to decipher the main points of a text.
- How well can a candidate grasp, recall, and reason about spatial connections between items or space?
Cognitive ability is assessed in what manner?
It is common practice to use multiple-choice examinations to gauge cognitive abilities. Logic puzzles, arithmetic difficulties, and reading comprehension questions may all be included in a test.
Questions are not challenging on their own, but there is a built-in time constraint that challenges the applicant to think swiftly and efficiently. Cognitive ability assessments are often about 10-30 minutes in duration. Among the various methods available, cognitive ability assessments may be the most underused in light of their usefulness.
If you haven’t already, you need to start utilizing cognitive ability testing immediately because of the following reasons:
- Cognitive ability exams may predict work success
It is one of the most convincing reasons to employ cognitive ability tests since they are a significant predictor of work success. Employers utilize a variety of techniques to pick applicants, including education level and work experience as well as a variety of planned and unstructured interview procedures.
When it comes to career success, an individual’s cognitive abilities are more closely linked to their job performance than their education level or their work experience.
It’s vital to understand that these elements compound with each other. Using cognitive ability tests in tandem with job interviews, for example, makes it even more likely that you’ll identify the perfect applicant.
- Tests of cognitive capacity assess the ability to learn and solve problems
Job performance can be predicted using cognitive ability tests since they can consistently predict how quickly candidates adapt to an ever-changing workplace. Often, your work success is decided by how fast you can learn on the job rather than what you already know.
Faster learning, adapting to change, and finding answers to new challenges are all facilitated by an employee’s cognitive talents.
- Cognitive ability exams let you discover your untapped potential
Resumes tell us what an applicant has previously done—not necessarily what they’re capable of. By measuring cognitive ability, you can uncover the “diamond in the rough” applicants who may have a shorter résumé but have all the necessary abilities to succeed in your company.
This is particularly useful when looking to fill entry-level roles for which there is likely to be a small pool of qualified applicants. Your firm will have clever personnel at every level of its hierarchy if you hire individuals who are fast to pick up new skills and fill your organization with smart people.
- Time and money are saved through cognitive ability assessments
An hour-long employment interview was shown to be no more accurate than a ten-minute cognitive evaluation exam, as seen above.
The most cost-effective way to hire exceptional personnel, according to Schmidt’s 1998 research, was cognitive evaluation exams. As a result, you may save time and money by eliminating individuals with low cognitive abilities throughout the application process.
- Tests of mental abilities
Bias should be deliberately avoided by every recruiter throughout the recruiting process. Hiring may benefit from a more objective viewpoint provided by cognitive ability testing.
Unconscious prejudices regarding intellect might drive even the greatest equal-opportunity recruiters to approach applicants differently. Because of prevailing gender norms, a recruiter may unintentionally prefer men for technical positions and women for interpersonal ones.
Using someone’s accent as an indicator of their socioeconomic and educational status is another type of prejudice. A candidate’s accent may lead an interviewer to draw erroneous inferences about their IQ without them even realizing it.
Regardless of how impartial you are when evaluating candidates, you might still be biased due to systemic prejudices that are woven into the fabric of our society.
As a recruiter, it’s a lot to handle when all of these things come together! Cognitive ability tests allow you to assess a candidate’s real intellect rather than their previous employment history, and to standardize the recruiting process to eliminate your unconscious assumptions of what intelligence may look like.
- Candidates are impressed with cognitive ability assessments
To demonstrate that you care about employing the best people, it’s important to properly evaluate prospective workers. You demonstrate that you’re forward-thinking, that you behave without prejudice, and that everything your organization does is well-thought-out by doing this.
Using current screening technologies, aptitude test, intelligent questions, and the opportunity for applicants to demonstrate their intellect will provide potential employees a pleasant preview of what it’s like to work at your organization.
- Tests of cognitive aptitude enhance memory recall
Using cognitive ability tests may help you recruit and impress the appropriate people from the start, which in turn improves organizational retention. In addition, one of the most important KPIs for HR departments is employee retention.
This is due to the fact that an employee’s yearly compensation may range from tens of thousands of dollars to two times that amount if they were to be fired.
Final words
When you take in the expenses of advertising the position, interviewing, screening, recruiting, onboarding, training, management time, lost productivity, lost engagement, higher errors, continuing training expenditures, and cultural effect, you can see how the costs start to pile up!!
