Pre-employment testing is an important part of growing and stabilising a business. While it may add another step to the recruitment process, it helps ensure you get the right person for the job.
That’s why leading companies adopt the “steady to hire, fast to fire” approach. They realise the proper testing will give them better retention and reduce cost related to readying a candidate for productivity.
But how you test is important as well. You want to ensure a certain level of proficiency in the programs you use every day. And that’s where a focus on Microsoft Word can help.
In the following article, we’ll be looking further into the importance and purpose of pre-employment screening. We’ll also hit on why MS Word should be included in your pre-testing platform of choice. Let’s begin!
What Is the Purpose of Pre-Employment Screening?
Pre-employment screening is invaluable in a number of ways. This includes:
- Ensuring smooth transitional flows from training to productive team member status; and
- Slowing the rate of turnover inherent when an employee doesn’t know what they’re doing
The longer your newly-hired team members spends in training, the more they’re costing you in terms of lost productivity.
Setting up a reliable pre-employment screening process will help reduce delays in the employee becoming as productive as possible. Skills testing should be used as a standard part of the pre-employment screening process. One of the most common software packages tested is Microsoft Word. It’s a critical program because it’s used pervasively in generating proposals and preparing reports for business processes and customer interaction.
What Is Microsoft Word Pre-Employment Testing?
Most every business is computer-based nowadays. As such, you need to know your employees are capable of handling themselves on Microsoft Word.
In a nutshell, Microsoft Word tests communication proficiency. It helps employees craft documents that influence and explain. A person with strong Microsoft Word skills can influence and impress customers and internal stakeholders alike.
MS Word Covers a Lot of Bases
If you missed our previous discussion on the eight benefits of screening new-hires with pre-employment skills testing. You’ll learn more about the psychology behind the practice.
Let’s look at some of the more specific areas that MS Word testing covers.
1. MS Word Tests Keyboard Proficiency
Employees that take forever to do basic things like typing up interoffice memorandum or report summaries cost much and accomplish little. MS Word is, first and foremost, a word-processing program. Combined with a typing test, it is the ideal program for seeing how many words-per-minute candidates can type, their error rate and their English usage.
2. It Evaluates Design Principles
The name might have “Word” in the title, but this program goes well beyond words to the heart of graphic design principles.
You don’t have to be an expert to be valuable in using design elements of MS Word. In fact, everyone should be able to use MS Word’s design tools because they help in other areas. Take pictures, for example. Any well-designed report, branding, or other forms of marketing collateral will need an eye-catching design that illustrates a mission or message. You usually can’t accomplish this with text alone.
Remember that saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words”? That’s no lie!
MS Word imports images, pulls in tables and graphs, and performs other functions to give your written communications a striking visual style.
This skill transfers to other areas like working with emails. MS Word design knowledge helps employees embed important visuals into emails and offers an overall versatility that helps strengthen the communication process from one platform/company to another.
3. It Teaches You to Check Your Work
Microsoft Word has several cool features when it comes to doing this effectively. You can:
- Use a basic spell-checker
- Export to PDF to make sure any visual additions look right in a multi-channel, distributed form
- Turn on the Track Changes function so other viewers of a document can leave suggestions for your work (or see the ones you’ve made for theirs)
The program essentially ensures you can create dynamic, competent textual and visual content. It also gives you the ability to check that work and cooperate with others to make sure everything is as it should be prior to it being distributed to a wide variety of people who will see it, both inside and outside of your organisation.
How Testing of Prospective Employees Works
You have two main options when it comes to testing prospective employees. You can either:
- Create MS Word tests yourself: you may have the proficiency, but do you have the time or method to create a reliable test?
- Hire outside: RightPeople’s MS Word test is Web-based and simulated to provide a realistic environment that simulates using the program. The tests examine all levels of proficiency including basic, intermediate, advanced and expert.
A professional skills test also provides a breakdown of results by topic, subject, difficulty level, and even by question for training purposes.
Pre-Employment Testing Moves You Closer to the Right Candidate
When you decide to incorporate pre-employment skills tests into your hiring practices, ensure Microsoft Word is a part of that process.
And if you don’t know where to begin with pre-employment testing, contact us today to learn where and how you can get started and make more informed hiring decisions!
