Companies these days require more than just an impressive resume, a bright smile, and a smooth initial interview to accept a candidate and turn them into a bonafide employee of theirs.
In this day and age, hiring managers are no longer just looking for proof of one’s credentials such as a list of qualifications and the extent of an applicant’s experience, but also qualities and traits that their resume and interview can’t tell them immediately.
This is the purpose of pre-employment tests.
In order to save on time, money, and man-power, companies include an assessment of sorts early on, or even at the beginning of, the hiring process.
One popular pre-employment test is the Wonderlic test, which is used in various industries from nursing to the army and even a number of athletic institutions.
By making candidates try and pass the Wonderlic test, these organizations will know if they can not only handle the job but also succeed in the years to come.
So, whether you are a fresh graduate that’s looking to land their first job or if you’re a professional who wants to find better opportunities somewhere, understanding why companies rely on the Wonderlic assessments in the recruitment process can help you get in the proper mindset to tackle it effectively.
1- It aims to confirm a person’s cognitive skills
As previously mentioned at the beginning of this article, companies and hiring managers have already wisened up to know that resumes, no matter how good they look, should be treated with caution.
In fact, it is not uncommon for them to be even more suspicious of, if not outright reject multi-page resumes.
Remember: Just because a person managed to work long enough in a certain company that does not mean they were a good employee and it is also likely that the individuals listed in their references are just giving them the courtesy of vouching for them.
By implementing a Wonderlic assessment early on in the recruitment process, the hiring manager will be able to confirm that the applicant is truly competent enough to be considered for the position.
2- It allows the company to see how well they can perform under pressure
If there is one thing that makes the Wonderlic stand out from other pre-employment tests, it would be its unforgiving ‘50-question item set that is to be answered within 12 minutes’ format.
This, coupled with the fact that the candidate will be told that their resulting score will be compared with what the others’, can easily make them panic and be stressed out, causing them to make terrible calculations or decisions in the entire test proper.
To put it into perspective, if you want to answer all 50 questions in the test, then you must only spend around 14 seconds or so per item, including the time to read, calculate, and look over the choices.
With this in mind, the company will be able to know first-hand if the applicant can truly work under pressure or within a strict time frame should they be hired.
3- A candidate’s score is a good indicator of their decision-making skills
Decision-making skills are hard to measure, especially when it is so early in the hiring or recruitment process.
Typically, interviewers and hiring managers will have to give the applicant a hypothetical workplace scenario that they will have to solve to the best of their knowledge.
At the Wonderlic test, however, this is tested in the way of you having to choose which particular questions should you answer over another.
This is because the exam itself was purposefully designed to have questions that are literal time traps and serves no purpose other than to try and make the candidate lose whatever time they have left on a single question, preventing them from answering potentially easier questions later on in the test.
Remember: although the difficulty of each question may vary, they are only worth one point each.
So whether you’re asking what’s the antonym of a certain word or what’s the decimal conversion of an absurd fraction or percentage, they both only give one point.
By showing that you are someone that can analyze which questions are time traps and focusing on ones that can secure your points, you give the company and the hiring manager the confidence that you are someone that can make sound decisions for them in the long run.
It measures a plethora of skills that are highly relevant in the workplace
Unlike other pre-employment tests that some companies use, where they only choose to measure a certain skill or subject like reading and written comprehension for newspaper companies as well as numerical reasoning skills for accounting firms, the Wonderlic test’s set of subjects aims to make sure that the test-taker is competent in all areas.
This is because the subjects included in the Wonderlic are: verbal reasoning, to ensure that the candidate has sufficient grammar and vocabulary skills; numerical reasoning skills, to ensure that they can perform simple, complex, and accurate calculations on the fly; logical and deductive reasoning skills, to see how good their problem-solving skills are; and graphical data interpretation skills, so that the company can be sure that the test-taker can understand the information located in graphs and statistical data.
All in all, this makes the Wonderlic assessments a well-rounded and all-encompassing exam to make sure that its candidates are truly competent and capable of succeeding in the role that they are applying for.
