You’ve sat through several interviews with a candidate.
After each interview, you walk away pink-cheeked and absolutely smitten by this person's charm. Maybe you can’t even believe your luck that they’re applying for the job. So, in an attempt to make sure you don’t lose them to a competitor, you send out your offer, and you cannot contain your excitement when they reply with an acceptance.
Time to crack open the bubbly as this new employee takes you to the moon… or so you thought.
Three months later, you're back to posting on job boards after going your separate ways with this hire, only to find out they just had the gift of the gab.
If only you had a pre-employment assessment to help you separate fact from fiction during the interview process.
To help you avoid making a bad hire, we decided to write this article on hiring assessment tests to help you pick the very best candidate for the job.
What Is a Pre-Employment Assessment?
Pre-employment assessment, or hiring assessment tests, is a framework that helps talent acquisition partners and HR teams evaluate candidates against specific criteria.
The goal of having these assessments while trying to fill a position is to try to gather as much objective evidence that a person is fit for the role they’re applying for. This is because their CV can only show you what they did in the past, not how they did it. And it’s difficult to separate someone's charm from their ability to do a job when having a dialogue. But a pre-employment assessment attempts to reduce these types of biases by extracting quantifiable data from the interviews and, if done correctly, can lead to:
- Faster hiring decisions
- More qualified hires
- Reduced costs from poor-fit hires leaving during probation
When you give a candidate a pre-employment assessment depends on your particular hiring plan and process.
You can ask a candidate to complete an assessment with their application, allowing you to assess their fit before inviting them to initial interviews. You could even ask them to perform the test during an interview to add some pressure, or send them an assessment to complete at different stages of the interview (with the latter being the preferred method).
Regardless of how you decide to have candidates complete their assessment, the purpose of having these pre-employment assessments in the first place is to measure:
- Cognitive abilities — problem-solving, reasoning, and critical thinking
- Personality traits — conscientiousness, extraversion, and openness to experience
- Technical skills — programming languages, software applications, or other industry-specific knowledge required for the role
- Behavioural tendencies — how a candidate is likely to react in different workplace situations
So, now you know what the point is in even investing in pre-employment assessments, here are 12 of the main types of hiring assessment tests that businesses like to use in their workflows to get you started with yours.
The 12 Main Types of Hiring Assessment Tests
The 12 pre-employment assessment tests we’ve highlighted before are all designed to measure different qualities a candidate should have when applying for a job (regardless of the industry or the type of work they’re applying for).
Starting with:
1. Cognitive Ability
A lot of white-collar, office jobs tend to put a considerable amount of cognitive pressure on their employees, and cognitive ability tests are designed to help you determine a candidate's:
- Problem-solving skills
- Abstract reasoning
- Learning speed
These types of tests are perfect for any business that undergoes any changes to processes and even what they sell and how they sell it. Businesses like a startup are a good example of this. These industries move fast, and you need someone who can keep up with that evolution.
Pro tip: If you’re a startup and would like help managing the people side of your business as you try to scale, we recommend checking out our free advice here: Startup Company HR Advice: A Practical Guide for Founders.
2. Personality Assessment
Having the skills and knowledge to fulfill a role is one thing, but another is how you’ll fit in with the company team and how a candidate behaves with others.
This is where a personality assessment would come in to learn about someone's behaviors based on the Big Five traits (also referred to as OCEAN or CANOE):
- Openness — is the candidate willing to try new things, or do they need a routine
- Conscientiousness — is the candidate a meticulous planner or a spontaneous thinker
- Extraversion — is the candidate extroverted or introverted
- Agreeableness — is the candidate driven by harmony, or are they competitive
- Neuroticism — is the candidate moody or anxious, or relaxed and even-keeled
Going through this list, you might already have an idea about how one personality type might be better suited for an executive position or how another might be better when they need to collaborate with other employees.
3. Job Knowledge
Probably one of the most important factors when hiring, especially if you’re looking to fill a senior position, is the person's understanding of the actual job.
This pre-employment assessment should be introduced pretty early in the recruitment process and used to screen whether applicants should be invited into meetings or not — which you’ll be able to deduce from their CV and application.
4. Integrity and Honesty
Integrity and honesty pre-employment assessment tests a candidate's ethics and is used to identify any potential counterproductive behaviour.
This is extremely important if the candidate is applying for a position that involves a high level of trust, such as handling cash, confidential information, or communicating with investors.
But there are also less intensive types of assessments, like flagging risks related to absenteeism and misconduct.
5. Situational Judgment (SJT)
Some jobs require people to make quick decisions on their feet, and a situational judgment test is one way to determine whether a candidate is a good fit for a role based on your own realistic workplace scenarios.
Knowing the right answer is one thing, but executing it is another, and a pre-employment assessment test will figure that out for you.
6. Skills-Based
Do they have the necessary skills to, as the kids say, pay the bills?
Skills-based assessments are relatively straightforward tests that see if the candidate has the knowledge and requirements for the job by testing:
- Coding
- Accounting
- Software proficiency
These tests should mirror what a typical task will look like for them in your company. You could even send them a real task to complete, but if you do that, be sure to pay them for their time and effort.
7. Emotional Intelligence (EQ)
Emotional intelligence tests measure empathy, self-awareness, and social regulation.
They're best for people management and collaborative roles, particularly leadership, and high-EQ hires tend to stay longer and improve workplace culture.
8. Physical Ability
Physical ability tests measure strength, stamina, and safe manual handling.
They're suited to construction, warehousing, and emergency services, and are only valid where physical capability is a genuine job requirement.
9. Language and Communication
Language and communication tests measure clarity in reading, writing, and speaking.
They're best for client communication and documentation-heavy roles, and a short written task or video response reveals communication style quickly.
10. Values and Cultural Alignment
Values and cultural alignment tests measure the fit between a candidate's personal drivers and the organization's purpose.
They apply to every permanent hire, and aligned values correlate with higher engagement and lower turnover.
11. Psychomotor
Psychomotor tests measure coordination, dexterity, and reaction time.
They're essential for a narrow set of roles, such as pilots, surgeons, and precision manufacturing, and largely irrelevant elsewhere.
12. Digital Literacy and AI Fluency
Digital literacy and AI fluency tests measure comfort with digital tools, AI use, and data privacy.
They apply to any role in a changing tech stack, helping identify early adopters and reduce training time.
And there you have it! The main types of pre-employment assessments you can introduce into your hiring processes.
But you’d still need to figure out how to prepare one. And luckily for all of us (regardless of what you think of the tech), LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude are more than capable of helping you with this task.
How to Create a Pre-Employment Assessment with AI
Employers can use an LLM like Claude or ChatGPT to build a pre-employment assessment from scratch by feeding it the job description and the specific skills or competencies the role requires, then directing it to generate structured test content rather than a single block of questions.
Start by providing the AI with the job description, the key skills and competencies the role requires, and any existing company standards or scoring criteria you want it to follow. Tell the AI to act as an experienced hiring manager or industrial-organizational psychologist, since that framing shapes the rigor and structure of the questions it produces. If you're using Claude, setting this up as a dedicated Project keeps the job description and your company's standards saved across the conversation, so you don't have to re-paste them each time you build a new assessment.
From there, ask the AI to generate a mix of question formats suited to the role, such as multiple-choice questions, situational judgment scenarios, or applied problem-solving tasks, and to map each question to a specific competency the role requires rather than writing catch-all content.
Once you have a first draft, review it for difficulty, scoring criteria, and the weight each competency should carry, then ask the AI to revise anything that doesn't meet your standards.
It's worth asking the AI to explain the reasoning behind each correct answer, since that makes it easier to spot questions that are ambiguous or too easy before the test goes out to candidates.
Example prompt to build the assessment:
"Act as an experienced hiring manager. Based on this job description [paste job description], build a pre-employment assessment that tests for [list key skills/competencies]. Include a mix of multiple-choice and situational judgment questions, map each question to the competency it tests, and provide the correct answer with a brief explanation for each."
Example prompt for practice questions:
"Review the assessment above and flag any questions that are ambiguous, too easy, or don't clearly map to a competency. Suggest a difficulty level and scoring weight for each question based on how critical that competency is to the role."
Whichever AI tool is used, the goal stays the same, building a test that scores candidates against the specific competencies the role needs, rather than a generic set of questions that could apply to any job.
And now you have everything you need to start creating your own pre-employment assessments for future hires.
But even with AI, hiring will still take up a lot of time from you and your managers. Assessments are one thing, but there are also interviews, CV reviews, creating and following onboarding checklists, and a whole other bunch of stuff you’ll need to do months, and even years, after hiring someone.
If you would prefer to free up time to focus on scaling your business, turning to an RPO agency might be the answer.
Using TalentHub for Sourcing and Hiring
TalentHub's sourcing service is built to reach hard-to-find candidates quickly, acting as an extension of the client's team to fill the pipeline with high-quality candidates who match the business's needs, whether the role is a C-level hire or a niche specialist position.
Depending on what the client needs, TalentHub delivers either a longlist of potential candidates to engage with or a shortlist of candidates already assessed for key skills and ready to move forward. TalentHub has a response rate above 70%, which it says exceeds the global industry benchmark.
The process runs through four stages, starting with a 30-minute intake call to understand the client's hiring needs to understand the client's hiring needs, followed by a kickoff meeting with the recruitment team to define those needs and set mutual expectations.
From there, TalentHub's recruiters carry out the sourcing and headhunt candidates who match the role and the client's culture. The process ends with either a longlist or a shortlist, depending on what the client chose at the outset, giving them a set of vetted candidates to carry into their own hiring process.
If you would like to learn more about how TalentHub recruitment agency can help you with your hiring efforts and design your pre-employment assessments for you, then feel free to book a call, and we’d be more than happy to discuss this further.
