Updated October 2024
Do you use pre-employment tests to screen candidates? Pre-employment tests can streamline your hiring process by helping you quickly identify qualified candidates and make objective comparisons.
What Are Pre-Employment Tests?
Pre-employment tests offer a versatile approach to evaluating candidates. They can help assess a wide range of technical skills, such as software proficiency, as well as cognitive abilities, including problem-solving and mathematical reasoning.
Using pre-employment tests can speed up your hiring process, considerably, and can also reduce bias to help you make data-based hiring decisions.
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What Are the Primary Types of Pre-Employment Tests?
1. Job Knowledge
While you may be happy to provide plenty of on-the-job training for some roles, chances are you have roles that require specific knowledge. When you test candidates on their job knowledge, you’ll be more likely to make a good hire.
A job knowledge test will cover technical or theoretical expertise. For instance, in information technology (IT), you may ask candidates about the key features of a particular programming language. In the healthcare industry, a job knowledge test may include questions on specific medications and their contraindications.
Best for: Roles that involve a lot of acquired knowledge, potentially from a specific qualification or many years of experience.
Limitations: Job knowledge tests only demonstrate what a candidate already knows—they don’t tell you how fast that candidate will learn, or how easily they can apply what they already know to a new situation.
2. Cognitive Ability
Cognitive ability tests measure a candidate’s abilities in areas like logical, verbal, and numerical reasoning. These tests, also known as aptitude or cognitive aptitude tests, can provide valuable insights into a candidate’s problem-solving skills and critical thinking abilities.
Cognitive ability has a positive correlation with job performance. Candidates who score well will be skilled problem-solvers who excel at analyzing data and situations. Their critical thinking and decision-making skills are likely to put them among the best candidates for the role.
Best for: Making confident hiring decisions based on clear data. Candidates can’t “cheat” a cognitive ability test. Qualities that may cloud an interviewer’s judgment (e.g. charisma) won’t affect the test.
Limitations: Some candidates may be highly intelligent and great at problem-solving but may lack other attributes that would make them the best fit for the role.

3. Integrity
Integrity pre-employment tests look at applicants’ values and ethics. They ask questions like:
- Would you lie to a client?
- Would you do something illegal if your manager asked you to?
- Would you cheat on a test if you knew you wouldn’t be caught?
An integrity test is designed to ensure that employees are a good match for the organization, will work well with colleagues, and will avoid taking actions that could be seriously detrimental to the company.
Best for: Roles that require a high degree of integrity, such as finance, cybersecurity, or healthcare.
Limitations: On integrity tests, the “right” answer is generally obvious to applicants. They may state that they would never lie or participate in illegal activity, even if that’s untrue.
4. Personality Tests for Cultural Fit
Personality tests can be a valuable tool in ensuring that new hires align with your company culture. By understanding a candidate’s personality traits and preferences, you can make informed decisions about their potential fit within your team and organization.
The Importance of Cultural Fit:
A strong cultural fit is essential for employee satisfaction, productivity, and retention. When employees feel connected to the company’s values and mission, they are more likely to be engaged, motivated, and committed to their work.
How Personality Tests Can Help:
- Identify Core Values: Personality tests can help you identify candidates who share your company’s core values and work ethic.
- Predict Job Satisfaction: By understanding a candidate’s personality, you can assess their potential for job satisfaction and engagement.
- Assess Teamwork Skills: Personality tests can reveal insights into a candidate’s interpersonal skills, communication style, and ability to collaborate effectively with others.
- Minimize Turnover: Hiring individuals who are a good cultural fit can reduce turnover and improve overall employee morale.
Best for: Roles requiring specific personality traits (e.g., sales, customer service, leadership) or teamwork.
Limitations: Can be unreliable if used as stand alone assessment due to limited predictive validity. To mitigate these, combine personality tests with other assessments (e.g., interviews, work samples, reference checks) for a more comprehensive evaluation.
Related: Interview Questions to Ask for Culture & Retention
5. Emotional Intelligence
For people-facing roles, emotional intelligence is particularly crucial. It’s also important for purely internal roles, where there’s an expectation for employees to get along and work well with one another.
Candidates who score highly on an emotional intelligence test are often:
- Easy to manage
- Able to accept critical feedback
- Work well under pressure
- Capable of handling setbacks well
Best for: Customer-facing roles, human resources (HR) positions, and any role that involves frequent interaction with peers, as well as high-pressure or stressful roles.
Limitations: As with other personality-based tests, it’s easy for candidates to give what they feel is the “right” answer.
6. Skills
Skills assessments may test candidates’ hard skills or soft skills, particularly the competencies listed on their resumes. They differ from job knowledge tests in that they ask candidates to show their skills in some way.
If you’re recruiting for an IT role, you may provide a skills test that asks the candidate to write a short piece of working code or debug an existing code snippet. If you’re recruiting an electrical engineer, you could ask them to demonstrate how they would test a specific device. In the healthcare industry, you could ask candidates to role play delivering difficult news to a patient.
Best for: Roles where you need someone to come in and perform well immediately, without spending months on training.
Limitations: The test results may not accurately reflect the reality of day-to-day work. For instance, if someone has a full week to complete a short coding project, the quality of their work may be artificially higher than what you’d expect when they’re facing time pressure on the job.
Related: Why Should You Use Skill Assessments? Here Are The Top 5 Reasons
Other Types of Pre-Employment Tests
There are several other common pre-employment tests you may use for certain roles, including:
Situational Judgment
A situational judgment test presents candidates with a typical work scenario and asks them to rank possible responses in order of effectiveness or in order of which they’d be most likely to do. This type of test can give you a good sense of the types of decisions a potential employee would make in different situations on the job.
Physical
You shouldn’t ask candidates to undergo a physical (medical) exam or physical ability test before making a conditional offer, as taking the results into account when hiring could be discriminatory. Also, all candidates in the job category should undergo the same exam. If a candidate has disabilities, you need to take this into account.
Drug
As with other physical and medical examinations, you should only ask job applicants to take a drug test after you make a conditional offer. You’ll need to adhere to state rules about drug tests, and you should take into account any ADA requirements for the candidate.

3 Benefits of Pre-Employment Testing in the Hiring Process
As a hiring manager, pre-employment testing can benefit your company in the following three ways.
1. A Streamlined Hiring Process
Pre-employment testing can speed up the time it takes to find the best job candidates. When all of your candidates take one or two tests, you can narrow down the applicant pool before carrying out screening interviews or full interviews.
2. Reduced Bias
We all have unconscious biases, and pre-employment tests can help reduce them. The test data is objective and makes it easy to compare one candidate against another. If an unsuccessful candidate challenges your hiring decision, the test data can help you make it clear why they weren’t chosen.
3. More Effective Interviews
Pre-employment tests give you insights into each candidate’s strengths, weaknesses, and experiences. You can use this insight when deciding on interview questions, perhaps asking a candidate to go into more detail about something they briefly described in the pre-employment test.
Hire Employees With Insight Global
Arranging and administering pre-employment tests may feel like yet another task on a long hiring to-do list. At Insight Global, we can take the pressure off by helping with the entire hiring process while working within your budget.
Get in touch with us today to find out more about how we can find talent, curate and screen candidates, conduct interviews, and even onboard your new hires.
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We can compile a list of quality vetted candidates fit for your needs in as little as one week. Questions? Call us toll-free: 855-485-8853