Making a bad hire can be incredibly costly. You may bring someone new onto the team, only to find out that their experience working with senior citizens was greatly exaggerated and that you will need to make a significant investment in order to get them up to speed. Or – potentially even worse – it may be a bad fit from a personality perspective. And if your company culture suffers, you may be dealing with the aftermath for years to come.
So, you want to be really sure about who you are onboarding. But by the same token, if you take too long to make your decision, you risk missing out on a potential superstar.
This is where pre-employment assessments come in. These can be conducted as part of the interview and help you determine whether someone will be a good hire. One of the big benefits is that it will give you more confidence about your hiring decision and hopefully speed up the decision-making process.
In this article, we will discuss some of the most common types of pre-employment assessments:
Personality and Emotional Intelligence Tests
To state the obvious: it takes a special type of person to work in the health care industry – especially senior living. Personality and EQ tests can help determine how empathetic the candidate is and whether they would have a good bedside manner when working with residents.
Beyond that, you also want to find someone who would be a good fit within the company’s culture. Is this a potential hire who will increase productivity or someone who will quickly divide the group with their toxicity?
Skills and Subject Matter Expertise Tests
A well-run senior care facility involves a lot of different roles working together. And, chances are, your HR department is probably not incredibly knowledgeable on the inner workings of them all. For example, if you are hiring for your accounting team, you should look into a job knowledge test that can assess familiarity and expertise with your particular system. This type of pre-employment assessment could also be particularly important for individuals delivering medications or treatment to residents.
Physical Ability Tests
This last type of pre-assessment test probably is not something that you would need to do when hiring for your senior care facility. That said, beyond being mentally and emotionally exhausting, working in senior living can also be physically demanding. You should be very clear about the job’s physical demands during the hiring process; otherwise, you risk job dissatisfaction and turnover.
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