Heena Rathor
- Aug 4, 2021
- 7 min read

Pre-Employment Tests and Floodgates

How Hiring managers feel when they receive job descriptions for vacancies in a large company:

What do I mean by this? Floodgates are gates that can be opened or closed to admit or exclude water, especially the lower gate of a lock.

Imagine you work in the HR department of a what we can call a fairly large company, let’s say Google, Adobe, or even PepsiCo. You get the task of hiring a UX designer for a particular department in your company and are immediately struck with despair. The despair of opening the floodgates; in this case, tens of thousands of applications for a single vacancy, in a single area, the task is enormous and the deadline is tight. So, you look to your friend, pre-employment tests to come to the rescue.

According to Forbes, Pre-employment tests are used to screen job applicants and can include testing of cognitive abilities, knowledge, work skills, physical and motor abilities, personality, emotional intelligence, language proficiency, and even integrity. Companies use testing to find the candidates most likely to succeed in the open positions and to screen out those who are unqualified.

This makes a lot of sense for a larger company, especially when you’re on a scale of the ones mentioned before. I myself have given several pre-employment tests for larger companies, and they all seem to have a different sort of procedure, but boil down to these 7 main categories:

1. Job Knowledge Tests: They are given to identify your knowledge about the job you're applying for.

2. Integrity Tests: They help measure the reliability of applicants. Your integrity may prove that you're a match for the employer's culture and show you can work well with co-workers.

3. Cognitive Ability Tests: These tests ask questions about your mental capacity to work in a position. The answers you provide help employers predict your job performance since they'll then know more about how you handle complexity

4. Personality Tests: Personality tests indicate to employers if you fit within the company's culture and if your personality leads to an increase in productivity.

5. Emotional Intelligence Tests: These tests analyze your relationship-building skills and your knowledge of emotions.

6. Skill Assessment Tests: These tests overview your soft and hard skills. Employers test for these skills once they're in the later stage of the hiring process to understand who they might want to hire.

7. Physical Ability Tests: Physical ability tests feature your strength and stamina. They also reveal if you're capable of performing in roles that require physical work, like a firefighter or a police officer.

If you’re a UI/UX or even Graphic designer, you might have come across the “Design Test”, which is essentially a specialized Skill Assessment Test, and in my experience, they are, for the most part, unnecessary.

I faced many tests from companies that had different operations in varied industries, such as Finance, SaaS, OTA’s and even design magazines/media agencies; and the reasons they gave me these “tests” were always common across the board, so I made a checklist:

We don’t understand how you think yet, so we’re going to send you a small design exercise to understand how you think
Everyone needs to give these tests, it’s a requirement of our hiring procedure
The field of your experience is different from our field, so we need you to do this assignment to understand how well you understand our field
Your methodology seems different compared to ours so we need to see you use our methodology for this one small assignment
We take these tests to assess the actual skill level of the applicant
We’ve narrowed it down to you and two other candidates, so we are sending a small test to you all to see how you fare

After going through the above, how many did you check off? If you checked off all of them, I feel your frustration resonates my own; but keep reading ahead because I will debunk each and every single one of these to put your mind at ease.

We don’t understand how you think yet

A designer takes a lot of time and effort creating their own portfolio, they usually evaluate the mountain of content they have created, choosing quality over quantity. Every designer worth their salt should be able to explain their decision making and methodologies adapted in their design process, and the interviewer, especially in UX would be able to draw out the strengths and weaknesses from their portfolio.

It’s a requirement of our hiring procedure

If you’re Google or Adobe and get tens of thousands of applications to one single position, then yes, it is understandable why you’d need a skill assessment test that is neutral across the board, so you can pick out the crème de la crème of the choices available. Though, if you are not a company that expects a thousand candidates a day, you don’t need it to be a “requirement”.

The field of your experience is different from our field

That may be true for a lot of designers, we apply to companies in varied industries. However, the company needs to realize that, all designers think differently. Turning away a designer just because they do not have prior experience in your field is just like saying, hey, you were a house painter in LA, but now you have to be a house painter in New Jersey and we prefer house painters who are from New Jersey. As long as the applied field is the same, problem solving boils down to core foundations, and any good designer should be able to adapt to their respective field fairly quickly and provide results.

Your methodology seems different compared to ours

Michal from UXDesignCC says,” To give a designer a vague, contrived task to complete in a week as a method to discern how he/she might solve a problem is like trying to discover how talented a brain surgeon is by watching them play the game “Operation”. It’s ineffective and unrealistic.” Designers have different ways of viewing a problem, coming up with solutions, and more often than not it may be different from the base organization they apply to. Though, isn’t this the kind of out-of-box thinking that is required and is unique to a designer?

We take these tests to assess the actual skill level

A designer doesn’t need to do any homework to prove their skillset. Any experienced designer will have an arsenal of tools at their disposal, and this arsenal does not need to be tested. Situation-based questions are more than enough to assess how a designer works, these can be dispersed in the portfolio presentation rounds or the technical round.

We’ve narrowed it down to you and two other candidates

This may be after the technical round, designers with a similar skillset may have hiring managers on crossroads. It is up to you, the designer to comply or deny the design test requirement in this particular case.

There are several pros and cons to taking these tests. I have done a fair few, and through that experience helped me create this checklist, that may help you too if you want to consider taking a design test in the future:

1. Does it help me expand my relevant portfolio?

Here’s a consideration that I would like to make more objective rather than subjective. In my case, I was a generalist and I did both Graphic and UI/UX. The multi-disciplinary workload did not give me the job satisfaction I needed, so I had to decide if I should switch from Graphic Design to User Experience design as my core principle. Switching meant updating my portfolio, and I agreed to do a rather lengthy design test so I could actually talk about my thought process as a UX SME.

2. What is the scope of the company and my growth in it as a designer?

Pre-employment tests require a pre-employment company evaluation from the designer's end in my opinion. You should know about the company you are applying to and ask the interviewer what your role will entail, and what the growth in this position ideally looks like. If you think it is a good fit for both, you can consider giving the test.

3. Is the company going to utilize these assets?

This is a tricky one, usually, companies just send off design tests and use them to screen applicants, but I have heard several cases of companies actually using the design solutions in their own marketing/UI redesign activities. This is an abysmal practice to say the least, but to avoid it, make sure your work is safe from plagiarism; watermark everything you send and if it helps, send across a letter of consent to the company stating that you have completed this assignment only for recruitment purposes, and they should not use it elsewhere.

4. Is it relevant to the job I have applied for?

For one particular test with a company, they had us sit in a room filled with desktops like you’d see in a high school, and give an IQ test. This test was for the post of a UI designer, and to me, it seemed bizarre as to why I, who had completed several years of education would need to do simple math in order to get a job.

5. Is it worth my time?

If you’re a designer, then you clock in a lot of man-hours in the process of design. Most of the time, the design tests are a waste of time: they usually refer to problems you may have solved before for your previous projects and you need not do them again, no matter what the reason may be. Your time is precious, and it does not need to be spent doing countless design tests for an infinite number of organizations.

6. What is my own skill level?

An introspective view is required to agree to any sort of design test you may receive. Is it for a job that required 6+ years of experience and you have only 2? In this particular case, an assignment makes sense, as you have not achieved the required experience, you may need to give a tangible overview of how you would be a better fit for this role for the company that is considering your application even though you lack the practice required.

Hiring for a job is a complicated process, and often companies miss out on good candidates because of these objective pre-employment screenings, as designers may not think the same way they were expecting. Isabella Carvalho explains some practices the hiring teams should take into consideration when screening for design applicants, and it is an interesting read, to say the least. My two cents on this would be, you, as a designer needs to be vigilant in accepting these tests in your own right and make more informed decisions. Giving tests does give you some experience, but it is up to you to do them.

Do you want to download the pre-employment assessment checklist?

A few steps to finding out if the test is beneficial for you!