Pre-Employment Assessments are tools used during the hiring process to evaluate a candidate’s potential fit for a role. These assessments measure attributes such as cognitive ability, soft skills, personality traits, problem-solving capacity, and job-specific knowledge. Unlike résumés or unstructured interviews, which often highlight past experience or surface-level impressions, pre-employment assessments provide science-backed, data-driven insights into how a candidate is likely to perform in the future.
Hiring mistakes are costly in terms of time, money, and team morale. Traditional methods like resumes and interviews are often subjective, prone to bias, and poor predictors of long-term performance. Pre-employment assessments offer a scalable, objective way to identify high-potential candidates based on the skills and behaviors that actually drive success. When validated by industrial-organizational psychology, these assessments reduce bias, improve quality of hire, and enable faster, fairer, and more confident hiring decisions.
Pre-employment assessments sit within the talent acquisition layer of the HR stack. They are typically used early in the hiring funnel after applications are received but before interviews begin. Leading providers integrate assessments directly into ATS platforms such as Greenhouse, iCIMS, and Paylocity, creating seamless, automated workflows. Platforms like Plum go further by combining multiple dimensions including cognitive ability, problem-solving, and soft skills into predictive role-based Match Scores, which help organizations prioritize candidates and inform structured interviews.
An effective assessment is grounded in industrial-organizational psychology, validated for predictive accuracy, and designed to reduce bias. It should measure traits tied directly to job performance, not just surface-level personality labels.
No. Some focus narrowly on IQ or personality types, while others like Plum combine multiple science-backed dimensions such as cognitive ability, problem-solving, behavioral drivers, and soft skills for a holistic view of candidate fit.
Not with a well-designed process. For example, Plum reports a 92% completion rate and a 93% satisfaction rate because candidates receive personalized insights into their strengths even if they are not hired.
Yes. When built and audited for fairness, assessments help counteract unconscious bias by shifting focus from résumés to measurable potential. Plum has passed independent audits with zero findings of adverse impact.
No. Assessments enhance the hiring process by informing more structured, consistent, and insightful interviews, but they do not replace the need for human judgment and conversation.