Recent surveys show that skills-based hiring and pre-employment testing are core to how organizations screen applicants. For example, the 2025 State of Skills-Based Hiring report finds that 76% of employers use skills tests to validate candidates’ abilities and view these tests as more predictive of job success than traditional methods.[1] This article goes beyond listing assessment types by outlining the exact questions to ask and the strategy to automate skills testing, allowing teams to validate real capability without increasing time-to-hire.
The 4 Core Areas of a Pre-Employment Skills Assessment
As mentioned above, employers use assessments to validate candidates’ skills. More and more organizations recognize its efficacy over traditional degree-based or experience-focused hiring. This shift reflects a pragmatic approach to talent acquisition, acknowledging that demonstrable skills are the most reliable indicators of job readiness and future success.[2] Below are the four core areas of an assessment that you can focus on, and some of the tools to use to evaluate candidates’ abilities.
- Hard skills (what they can actually do): Use Codility to assess candidates’ coding skills. The tool has over 90 ready-made coding languages, so you do not have to build everything yourself.
- Soft skills (how they work): You can use Testlify, which comes with soft skills components (communication, critical thinking) as part of broader talent evaluations. This replaces gut feel with consistent data, especially useful for remote or team-based roles.
- Cognitive ability (how fast they learn): The Raven’s Progressive Matrices Test or Raven’s Matrices is a non-verbal test that assesses abstract reasoning, problem-solving, and the ability to identify patterns and relationships.[3]
- Cultural add (how they contribute): A tool like Xobin allows you to evaluate candidates’ cultural alignment. With it, you can have insights to ensure that they match with your organization’s values, behavior, and work environment.
For more tools, check out this guide to recruitment assessment tools and how you can leverage them effectively in your hiring process. Below is the overview of the tools that are integrated with Manatal.
Role-Specific Practical Skills Assessment Templates
In this section, we take a look at some of the interview question templates, divided by roles, that you can customize to fit your hiring needs.
For Sales Roles
- A prospect says, “Your product looks good, but we’re already working with another vendor and switching feels risky.” How would you handle this objection and move the deal forward?
- After a demo, the buyer says, “Send me the materials, and we’ll review internally.” What would you do next, and why?
- A qualified prospect is interested but keeps delaying with: “Let’s revisit this next quarter.” There is no budget issue. How would you create urgency without offering a discount?
- A prospect is engaged but keeps looping back to price late in the process, despite earlier alignment on value. How would you handle this without restarting the entire sales cycle?
- You’re confident a deal will close, but the buyer suddenly goes quiet after legal review. What steps would you take to re-engage while maintaining professionalism?
- You’re behind quota midway through the quarter. How would you assess your pipeline and decide where to focus your effort?
- A stakeholder who supported the deal leaves the company mid-cycle. How would you protect or recover the opportunity?
For Admin or Operations Roles
- You’re supporting multiple stakeholders. At the same time, your manager asks for a report due today, a team lead needs urgent help scheduling interviews, and a vendor is waiting for payment confirmation. How would you prioritize and handle this situation?
- You notice that a recurring admin task is often delayed because different teams follow different processes. What steps would you take to fix this?
- You realize you’ve made an administrative error that could impact a deadline or stakeholder expectation. What would you do?
- You receive incomplete information for a task that is blocking others from moving forward. How would you handle the situation?
- Two teams follow different processes for the same administrative request, causing confusion. What would you do to address this?
- You’re asked to support a task outside your usual responsibilities while maintaining your regular workload. How would you approach this?
- A recurring operational task keeps missing deadlines. How would you identify the cause and prevent it from happening again?
For Marketing Roles
- You’re asked to launch a campaign quickly with limited data about the target audience. How would you approach planning and execution?
- Leadership wants to try a new marketing channel, but there’s little evidence it will perform. How would you evaluate and respond to this request?
- A campaign is performing well on engagement but poorly on conversions. How would you decide whether to optimize or pivot?
- You’re managing multiple campaigns with overlapping timelines and limited resources. How would you prioritize your work?
For universally critical soft skills like resilience and ownership, behavior-based questions are most effective. Ask candidates to describe specific situations:
- Describe a time you encountered a significant setback in a project. What was the setback, what steps did you take to overcome it, and what was the outcome?
- Tell me about a project where you made a mistake. How did you identify it, what did you do to rectify it, and what did you learn from the experience?
- "Describe a situation where you had to adapt quickly to a significant change in plans or priorities. How did you manage the transition and ensure your work remained on track?"
Explore more role-specific, ready-to-use interview questions to help you assess real-world skills and make better hiring decisions.
How Pre-Employment Skills Assessments Improve Hiring Outcomes
Role-specific skills assessments improve how hiring decisions are made and executed. When assessment data is structured and centralized, your team gains several advantages:
- Faster decision-making: Standardized scores reduce back-and-forth between recruiters and hiring managers, enabling quicker shortlisting and approvals.
- More objective evaluations: Comparing candidates on the same criteria minimizes reliance on subjective impressions or resume-based assumptions.
- Improved collaboration: Centralized assessment results give all stakeholders a shared view of candidate capability, reducing misalignment and rework.
- Operational efficiency at scale: Integrating assessments into the ATS eliminates data silos and manual tracking across emails and spreadsheets.
Platforms like Manatal support this approach by centralizing assessment results through Candidate Scorecards and third-party integrations, allowing you to evaluate resumes and skills evidence in one view and make confident, data-backed hiring decisions.
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Preserving Candidate Experience When Using Skills Assessments
A long and complex assessment can sour the candidate experience. It often causes candidates to drop early and have a bad perception of your hiring process. To mitigate this, you need to be strategic in your approach to timing, the length of a test, and feedback.
- Timing: For high-volume or entry-level jobs, immediately after the application, you can send a brief screening test to quickly filter out unqualified candidates. Reserve the more in-depth tests after a candidate has passed initial screenings or interviews.
- Length: A common guideline is aiming for 15 minutes or less for an initial skills test. This could be a 10-question online quiz or a small practical exercise that showcases a key ability. If a pre-employment skills assessment needs to be longer, such as a coding challenge or case study, consider splitting it into parts or moving it to later in the process when candidates expect a deeper evaluation.
- Feedback: For those who advance, clearly outline next steps and timelines. Say “We’ll review your results and get back to you by next week with potential interview times”. For those who don’t move forward, send a polite, prompt note thanking them for their time, and if possible, a brief mention of something positive from their assessment or an encouragement to apply for future roles. This communication shows respect for the effort they put in.
Mitigating Bias Risks in Pre-Employment Skills Assessments
Although implementing pre-employment skills assessments looks neutral, it could disproportionately screen out candidates from protected groups. To avoid this, demonstrate that the assessment accurately measures job-related skills and predicts job performance. Standardized scoring ensures that all candidates are evaluated against the same criteria, reducing the influence of unconscious bias. Plus, the integration of AI in hiring can potentially ensure candidates are evaluated more objectively, though it requires careful implementation to mitigate biases.[4] Industry best practices suggest that standardized scoring, often facilitated by an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) like Manatal, offers better protection than relying solely on subjective judgment or "gut feeling."
Conclusion
A resume is a document that reflects past claims rather than demonstrable and current skills. To effectively hire the right candidate, implementing pre-employment skills assessments delivers objective, role-specific evidence across hard skills, soft skills, cognitive ability, and cultural add. When integrated seamlessly through platforms such as Manatal and implemented with disciplined timing, reasonable length, and clear candidate communication, assessments can improve decision quality without harming candidate experience. Equally important, using job-relevant, validated tests with standardized scoring helps ensure legal compliance and reduces bias. Organizations that adopt structured skill assessment strategies achieve up to 91% faster hiring with turnover rates reduced by as much as 27%, making skills-based evaluation a critical foundation for building resilient, high-performing teams.[5][6]
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What is a pre-employment skills test?
A: Pre-employment skills tests are tools used by employers to evaluate job candidates' skills, knowledge, and suitability for specific roles. They assess technical skills, cognitive abilities, problem-solving, and sometimes soft skills, aiming to identify candidates with the potential to succeed. These tests also help standardize the hiring process and reduce bias by objectively comparing candidates' abilities.
Q: What is the most popular pre-employment skills assessment used?
A: Aptitude tests are the most popular pre-employment skills assessments, valued by employers for their standardized evaluation of a candidate's problem-solving, critical thinking, and adaptability skills. These tests include sections on numerical, verbal, and logical reasoning, giving insights into how candidates process information and handle challenges. They are seen as reliable predictors of future job performance and potential growth, making them valuable in recruitment.
Q: What causes a red flag on a pre-employment skill assessment?
A: A red flag on a pre-employment skill assessment can arise due to discrepancies between a candidate's claimed skills and actual performance, suggesting exaggeration or misrepresentation. Insufficient performance in key areas and inconsistent responses can indicate a lack of necessary skills and attention to detail. Behavioral issues, such as resistance to feedback and difficulty collaborating, may also be concerns. These signs help employers assess a candidate's suitability and potential fit within the organization.
Q: Do pre-employment skills assessments improve retention and performance?
A: Pre-employment skills assessments enhance retention and performance by ensuring candidates have the necessary skills for the job. By aligning abilities with job requirements, companies hire more competent and engaged employees, reducing dissatisfaction and turnover. These assessments improve the quality of hires, creating a workforce better suited to meet organizational goals and adapt to job demands, ultimately boosting overall performance.
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