Are You Using Pre-Employment Assessments? You Should Be

A bad hire is costly in more ways than one. You might bring someone onto the team only to discover their stated experience with seniors was exaggerated, requiring a significant investment to bring them up to speed. Or the mismatch might be about fit rather than skill, and a poor cultural fit can affect team morale for a long time after that one hire is gone.

At the same time, taking too long to decide risks losing a genuinely strong candidate to a faster-moving competitor. Pre-employment assessments help you move with more confidence and less guesswork. One widely cited analysis from Aberdeen Group found that companies using pre-employment assessments saw roughly a 39% lower first-year turnover rate compared to those relying on interviews alone. Treat that number as directional rather than a guarantee. Vendor-published figures in this space vary widely, and the honest takeaway is that structured assessment generally beats gut instinct, not that any specific percentage is assured.

It’s also worth being transparent with candidates about why you’re asking them to complete an assessment and roughly how long it will take. Candidates who understand the purpose tend to engage more genuinely, and a vague or overly long assessment process can itself cost you strong applicants who simply move on to a faster-moving opportunity elsewhere.

Here are the most common types of pre-employment assessments worth considering, and how to think about choosing between them.

Personality and emotional intelligence tests.

Working in senior care takes a particular kind of person. Personality and EQ assessments can help gauge a candidate’s empathy and how they’re likely to interact with residents day to day. They also help surface whether someone is likely to strengthen your team’s culture, or quietly work against it.

Skills and subject matter expertise tests.

A well-run senior care facility depends on many different roles working together well, and your HR team won’t always have deep expertise in every one of them. A job knowledge test tailored to a specific role, accounting, clinical documentation, or medication administration among them, can verify real competency rather than relying on a resume’s claims alone. This matters most for roles directly involved in resident care and medication.

Physical ability tests.

This won’t apply to every role, but it’s worth considering for positions with real physical demands. Senior care work can be physically taxing in ways that aren’t always obvious from a job description. Being upfront about physical requirements during hiring, assessment included, helps avoid the job dissatisfaction and early turnover that comes from a candidate discovering the physical reality only after starting.

Choosing the right assessment for the role.

Not every position needs every type of test, and over-testing can slow your hiring process down enough to lose strong candidates to competitors who move faster. A direct care role working closely with residents might weigh a personality and EQ assessment most heavily. A clinical leadership role might call for a skills-based assessment focused on regulatory knowledge, paired with a lighter-touch culture fit conversation. Matching the assessment to what actually predicts success in that specific role, rather than applying the same standardized test to every open position, tends to produce better results and respects candidates’ time.

What assessments can’t replace.

A strong assessment narrows your decision, but it shouldn’t make the decision for you. The data gives you a useful signal, not a verdict, and the best hiring processes treat a test result as one input alongside a real conversation, reference checks, and your own judgment about fit. Relying too heavily on a score can also mean overlooking a candidate whose lived experience, caring for a family member, working through a difficult career transition, doesn’t show up cleanly in a standardized test but translates into exactly the kind of empathy and resilience this work requires.

Pairing assessments with real recruiting expertise

Assessments are a strong tool, but they work best alongside a recruiting partner who already understands what good fit looks like in this industry, and who can help interpret results in context rather than treating a score as the final word.

Photo by Dawid Małecki on Unsplash