How Can Skills Testing Aid Seasonal Recruitment?

It’s no secret that the rush to recruit seasonal workers can cause a lot of headaches. Every year, many businesses need to hire many new staff for the Christmas period, requiring rapid high-volume recruitment with a fast turnaround for onboarding and training, all the while coordinating employees’ shifts, hours, leave, and more.

This is tricky enough without the additional challenges caused by the Great Resignation, leading to a shortage of workers and those employees demanding more from their employers. Last Christmas, research by Glassdoor found that the average hourly wage for seasonal workers was at its highest ever — £9.47 an hour — as a result of workers being in short supply.

With seasonal workers’ wages expected to remain high in the upcoming season, anyone involved in recruitment is likely to be searching for ways to cut costs, speed up time-to-hire, and pick the perfect seasonal employees. One effective way to do this is by using skills tests in seasonal hiring – here’s why.

What are skills tests?

Skills tests are short online assessments that help determine whether a potential employee is a good fit for the job. After the candidate completes the test, recruiters can see their results and use this as an objective and bias-free manner of measuring candidates against each other.

A wide range of skills tests exist, including numeracy and literacy tests, and situational judgement tests. There are also career-specific skills tests that evaluate a candidate’s capabilities for a particular element of the job description, for example typing tests or health and safety knowledge.

The benefits of skills tests include eliminating bias and gut instinct from the hiring process, improving accuracy in hiring, and even indicating training needs of new employees. Often used when hiring full-time team members, skills tests can also be helpful when hiring seasonal employees for fixed term contracts.

Why are the benefits of skills tests when hiring seasonal employees?

Process more applications quickly

When hiring for seasonal work, time is of the essence; in a competitive hiring landscape, you need to be able to quickly hire the best candidates before they’re snapped up by other seasonal employers.

One of the biggest benefits of skills tests is that they speed up hiring without compromising on accuracy. By implementing a skills assessment as part of the application process, your team can ensure that you weed out unsuitable applicants straight away and only spend time interviewing and recruiting the most appropriate candidates.

Today, with online skills tests available with no need to download complicated software or show up at a test centre, all the applicant needs to do is click a link and complete the short exercise. The results and data are effectively delivered back to your team, allowing you to make informed decisions about which workers to interview or hire.

Hire more accurately

Speed isn’t the only consideration when hiring temporary workers for the season, accuracy is equally important. There’s nothing worse than hiring a promising temporary cohort at the beginning of the season and then finding out that many of the workers are not suited to the work.

Maybe somebody over-exaggerated on their CV and promised language skills they don’t have; perhaps it turns out that another seasonal employee’s customer service skills are lacking — there are a wide range of ways that candidates can seem incredible during hiring and then disappoint later on.

Fortunately, skills tests are a great way to eliminate any of these nasty surprises by assessing the applicants’ aptitude early on in hiring. Depending on your business and the job they’re applying for, you might choose to ask potential employees to complete a skills test to analyse their literacy, numeracy, language skills, or retail skills to ensure that they have all the necessary abilities.

This helps you maintain a high standard among all seasonal temporary workers you recruit and reduces the risk of high turnover during the period.

Maintain safety standards

In many industries such as retail and hospitality, the Christmas period can be extremely busy and demanding on temporary employees who may be still getting to grips with the job. In this time, unfortunately, the risk of accidents and incidents may be higher than usual.

One of the benefits of using skills testing before you hire seasonal workers is that it allows you to assess health and safety knowledge and skills before the new seasonal employee even starts the job. There are a variety of different health and safety tests suited for different industries and job descriptions, including retail health and safety, first aid, accident prevention and PPE, and much more.

By incorporating these into the hiring process, you can embed health and safety awareness early on and reduce the risk of problems later down the line.

Save time with candidate deselection

Finally, a little-known benefit of skills tests is that they can act as self-deselection tools.

Let’s say you send out a situational judgement test in which seasonal retail staff are asked to provide their responses to various everyday scenarios. While some applicants undertaking the tests may comfortably answer all the questions, others might realise that the job isn’t quite their cup of tea. Realising this and withdrawing their application early in the process saves you time and resources, allowing you to better focus on those candidates who are a good fit for the seasonal employment.

Which skills tests should employers use for seasonal staff?

Situational judgement tests

Situational judgement tests (SJTs) are a perfect addition to the seasonal hiring process because they provide an essential insight into how a potential hire will perform in the job. By providing the candidate with everyday scenarios that they might experience in the role and asking them to select one of four available answers, recruiters can evaluate applicants’ soft skills, common sense, and practical intelligence. This allows you to make informed decisions about who to hire for seasonal employment.

Personality profiling

When putting together teams of seasonal employees, it can be hard to get the mix of personalities right. While some jobs may be better suited to particular personalities, it’s generally a good idea to try to balance the different personality types on the team to promote teamwork and make the busy period pass more harmoniously.

Personality profiling is a type of psychometric testing that allows you to analyse the behaviours, communication type, and teamwork styles of potential seasonal workers. After completing a short online questionnaire, the applicants are split into helpful and memorable categories that allow you to place the right people in their ideal seasonal employment.

Job-specific skills tests

Depending on the type of employment, it’s often helpful to ask applicants to complete aptitude tests that are specific to the job description. This gives in-house recruiters a clear insight into how the workers will perform in their roles.

For example, if you are hiring for call centre temporary team members, a phonetic alphabet test might be useful, whereas applicants for seasonal retail employment might undertake a stock control test.

Moreover, offering job-specific skills tests can even help those seasonal employees brush up on their skills before they start working, streamlining their training and onboarding for higher productivity and better integration with full-time team members.

Implementing seasonal employment skills testing

When recruiting seasonal employees in today’s competitive landscape, acting fast and making accurate hires is key. If your organisation doesn’t already use skills testing when hiring seasonal staff, this is the right time to give it a go.

Skillsarena can help with all your recruiting needs. With a wide range of tailored and customisable skills tests to help you find the perfect extra help for the busy period, they can help take the headache out of hiring seasonal employees.