Pre-Hire Assessment for Technicians

Technicians not only require technical capabilities and knowledge, they also require the right behavioural competencies to succeed in the non-technical parts of the job. These may include dealing with customers, handling admin tasks or prioritisation.

Pre-hire assessments can help to identify which technicians have the required technical and non-technical attributes to thrive in the role more quickly and effectively than traditional selection methods e.g. a CV or Resume. The right assessment tool will also enable technician recruiters to make smarter candidate selection decisions that lead to lower employee turnover and higher staff productivity.

The Statistics

  • The average staff turnover in mechanic jobs is 27.2% (Source: The Retinent)
  • Just over 11% of professional service employees left their job last year (Source: LinkedIn)
  • The direct cost of replacing a frontline worker is around 20% of their annual salary (According to the Center for American Progress (CAP))
  • The indirect costs of failed hires are significantly higher and can be calculated here.
  • 7.7% of all Field Service Technicians are women, while 92.3% are men (U.S. data Source: Zippia)

Common Technician Jobs:

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Field Service Technician

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Field Service Engineer

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Maintenance Technician

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Glass Technician

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Body Repair Technician

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Mechanic

Why Use Pre-Employment Assessments in your technician hiring?

Technician roles are vastly different form company to company. They require unique knowledge, skill and behaviours depending on a number of factors such as where they are based (e.g. remote or on-site), seniority level and training provision.

ThriveMap works with innovative companies to create bespoke assessments that model the skills and competencies required to thrive in your unique environment. Most of our technician or service engineer customers use their assessments at the start of the hiring process – just after the point of application to communicate what to expect in the role to candidates as well as to help their recruiters to identify which candidate to prioritise in the recruitment funnel.

Pre-employment testing for entry-level field service technicians tend to focus on identifying candidates who have the required behaviours to learn the skills in training and on the job. Our technician assessments have helped to reduce new hire turnover, reduce time-to-hire, improve the diversity of new hires (especially the women: men ratio) and increase new hire performance.

What Tests to Use?

Despite some similarities in the type of tasks being performed, technician roles are all unique and each company will have different ways of working. For example, technicians that deal with automobile body shop or car glass will have different performance metrics and a different approach to customer service than those dealing with utilities, or factories. 

Administering a realistic job assessment approach ensures not only that candidates have the right combination of skills and competencies to thrive, but also that they know what type of working environment they are committing to ahead of joining.

Often this involves a combination of technical questions to measure someone’s mechanical aptitude as well as judgement based questions to measure soft skills such as customer service and problem-solving.

ThriveMap’s approach to this is to typically involve simulating the tasks that people find challenging when in the role and designing realistic scenarios and tasks. This has been proven to be more effective than generic or abstract tests at establishing whether candidates will be able to perform the tasks your roles demand.

Where to use assessments in the recruitment process for Technicians?

When recruiting staff for technicians its best to use assessments at the top of the recruitment funnel, automatically after job application to identify which candidates to prioritise in the applicant pool for faster, more effective hiring.

Why ThriveMap?

ThriveMap is the #1 Realistic Job Assessments platform.

Combining the most predictive selection methods into one assessment, ThriveMap’s Realistic Job Assessments take candidates through the experience of a working day in the role in your company – giving you and them a better picture of suitability from the outset.

We’re different for the following reasons:

You’ll get complete personalisation

Each company is unique. In fact, each role within each company is unique. Someone could perform well in the same job in another company and fail in yours.

We measure behaviour in context.

People behave differently in different contexts. Measuring someone’s ability in one environment does not mean they’ll display that ability in another.

We give you full transparency.

Jobs are constantly evolving. Unlike other assessment providers, if something’s not working, you have the power to change it.

We make your candidate the hero of the story.

We place the candidate in the heart of the story of a typical work day. If they don’t like the sound of the role or culture they can withdraw from the process at any time.

Find out how ThriveMap helps companies that recruit technicians to:

  • Improve new hire retention
  • Hire more productive employees
  • Save time recruiting

Technician assessment