How Early Careers Assessments Can Secure Top Talent and Avoid Bad Hires

Early careers hiring, especially graduates and apprentices, presents unique challenges to talent acquisition (TA) teams, but also significant opportunities. Nowhere else in TA sees the volume of applicants that early careers teams do; nothing really comes close. Additionally, because these candidates are fresh out of school or university, they have almost no experience or practical skills, reducing the effectiveness of CV screening and interviewing.

Although these seem like problems, this is only the case when you rely on unscalable selection tools like CV screening and interviewing. When using more scalable early career assessments, such as aptitude tests, these problems become significant advantages and can radically improve your quality of hire.

In this article, we will outline best practices for improving the quality of hiring using early careers assessments, with step-by-step recommendations for making the most of your applicant pool.

The first and most important step to improving your early careers hiring process is to diversify your selection tools. Many organisations build significant redundancy into their selection process by just adding more rounds of interviews. In extreme cases, early career hires may have to complete 3-5 rounds of traditional interviewing, resulting in tremendous redundancy in the selection process. Realistically, the first interview will provide 90% of the process's effectiveness, with subsequent interviews showing substantial diminishing returns. This is particularly true for early careers, where candidates aren’t really expected to have any experience worth discussing in the first place.

The most important addition to your selection process at the early careers level will be aptitude tests — i.e. verbal, numerical, and logical reasoning tests. Ultimately, early career hires aren’t expected to have practical, real-world skills yet, but they are required to have the potential to acquire those skills. Aptitude tests are the best predictors of one's ability to learn and apply learned knowledge to solve problems, make decisions, and follow processes. This makes aptitude tests uniquely useful at this level, as the learning component of the role is larger than at any other part of a candidate's career.

Interviews are, fundamentally, interpersonal skills tests, and the most charismatic candidates perform best. Charisma isn’t a determining factor for aptitude test performance, giving less charismatic candidates an opportunity to shine. This helps organisations reduce their reliance on interviews, saving them from the opportunity cost of having hiring managers conduct interviews instead of focusing on their core job functions.

The next essential step to improving the quality of hire is to be highly selective with your applicants. The value you get from your selection process is directly proportional to how selective you are; the more selective you can be, the better the quality of hire. For example, if you interview 10 applicants and pick the top 5, they are likely to be of decent quality. However, if you interview 10,000 applicants and pick the top 5, those are likely to be the cream of the crop, representing the top 0.05% of applicants. This effect is linear.

This, however, only matters if you are using valid selection tools that effectively predict performance. If you have 10,000 applicants and you screen 99% out randomly, the remaining 1% won’t be any better than the deselected 99%. This is almost certainly the case with CV sifting at an early career level, as graduates and apprentices often have nothing worth reading in a CV from a selection perspective. However, given that aptitude tests represent the strongest predictors of performance that we know of in occupational psychology, you are well advised to be highly selective, boosting quality of hire massively. This approach is particularly time-efficient, as 10,000 applicants can be invited to complete a battery of aptitude tests literally from the click of a button.

One highly effective way to increase the size of your applicant pool and make the most of your early careers assessments is to drop unnecessary selection criteria. Graduate programmes in particular are notorious for organisations using inherently arbitrary selection criteria to artificially reduce their applicant pool, especially by organisations that rely on unscalable selection tools. Naturally, if you only interview and sift CVs, then screening 10,000 applicants is a monumental task, and so organisations throw in arbitrary barriers to reduce the workload.

Academic requirements are the most common way of achieving this, including mandating a minimum number of UCAS points, a particular degree classification, or even certain GCSEs. From the research, we know that academic achievements are a poor indicator of job performance on their own, but when combined with aptitude tests, they show no utility whatsoever. The logic is that if you are smart, you will do well in school, and thus that translates to learning and knowledge acquisition in the role. However, if you are using aptitude tests, academic requirements become completely redundant and irrelevant.

The same goes for other arbitrary criteria, such as extracurricular activities, work experience, and attendance at specific universities. Once again, the logic is that displaying these experiences indicates some level of a desired psychological construct—i.e. cognitive ability, work ethic, motivation, etc. However, if these constructs matter, you should measure them directly with valid and reliable early careers assessments, instead of inferring them from CV content. Not only is this approach more effective, but it is substantially better from a diversity and inclusion perspective. It's no secret that higher socioeconomic status (SES) individuals have an advantage when it comes to educational achievement, university choice, extracurricular activities, and relevant work experience. By actively measuring the characteristics that matter, you level the playing field and stop advantaging high SES candidates who can afford to pad out their CV with superficially impressive experiences.

Organisations that rely on unscalable selection tools and arbitrary selection criteria tend to see high volumes of applicants as a problem, not an advantage. If you cannot efficiently shortlist, then high volumes of applicants represent a huge time, effort, and money sink, and actually reduce the quality of hire. However, if you can quickly, fairly, and effectively shortlist using early careers assessments, then volume becomes a massive competitive advantage, as you can simply pick the very best candidates. This mindset shift can be challenging for employing organisations, but it pays tremendous dividends down the line.

For more information on how Test Partnership can help you streamline your selection processes and boost quality of hire, feel free to book a call with us to discuss your requirements.