If you’ve ever hired a new employee, you know that success can be a game of chance.
Get it right and everyone’s happy. Get it wrong and disaster can ensue.
A bad hire can cost roughly 5x an employee’s salary. And that doesn’t even consider all the other problems, like upsetting team morale or poor job performance leading to damaged client relationships.
It’s clear making the right hire is important. And while there’s no one silver bullet to get it right every time, there’s definitely one tool worth putting in your talent management arsenal that is more effective than most predictors and will help you hit the bullseye more often than not: cognitive ability tests.
Here are six reasons you should consider making cognitive ability a part of your pre-employment tests to assess a candidate’s ability:
Cognitive ability assessments are extremely predictive of job performance. In fact, they’re among the most well-researched assessments in the social sciences. Frank L. Schmidt found that cognitive ability explains, on average, a whopping 42% of job performance! In the right hands, that kind of predictive power will make hitting talent Blackjack a regular thing in both hiring and promotion decisions.