Posted by EmployTest - on Wed, Jul 21, 2010 @ 03:13 PM
Like the seasonal monsoon, the flood of applicants arrive each time you post a job opening. What, you only get dozens of resumes for each position you post? Consider yourself lucky. Others have told us of hundreds of resumes and the highest number we've heard is 836 applicants. For a single position. And you might have experienced many more than that.
Well, brace yourself and don't expect it to change any time soon. Today, Fed Chairman Ben Bernancke testified to Congress that it would take "a significant amount of time" for the job market to absorb the 8.5 million jobs lost in the past two years alone.
What does this mean for you, the one tasked with navigating through such a flood?
It means that the easy times of 10 years ago aren't coming back any time soon. Remember when you had to struggle to find one keeper out of 3 applicants? Now, and for the foreseeable future, you will continue to have dozens of highly qualified applicants. And you will need a methodology to determine which applicant is the best fit for the job. And we think that methodology should include pre-employment tests (preferably ours, of course).
The bad news is that you'll need to keep your processes in place to deal with this continued flood. And if you don't have processes in place, by all means develop them. But the good news is that you'll continue to have your choice of the best job applicants of the last twenty years.
Posted by EmployTest - on Wed, Jul 29, 2009 @ 03:22 PM
In June the City of Bozeman, Montana, created quite a controversy when it asked job applicants to surrender the passwords to any social networks that they belong to, such as Facebook. Applicants (and the general public) were shocked because of the privacy concerns and city officials eventually backed off the request.
In the spirit of other strange employment requests, now a railway company in Tokyo is employing a "Smile Detector" to measure employees' smiles.
While it's not clear if the Smile Detector is being used as an employment test, it is a scary thought that an applicant's natural physical appearance can be used (or tested) as a requirement for employment. This type of pre-employment testing may not be such a good idea.