Pre-Hire Test Selection using O*NET

Need some advice? Deciding which test titles to administer can sometimes be overwhelming because there are so many options to choose from. While you cannot test for every attribute desired, this handy tool, O*NET, can assist.

Developed by the US Department of Labor, this online tool helps you determine, based on the job title, which skills, knowledge and abilities are typically needed for specific job positions. You can visit O*NET to search by job title and the below video will show you how. If you instead want to talk with our friendly team, just Contact Us and we’ll be happy to help.

Hi, my name is Ken and I want to show you how to use the ONET Online database to lookup job descriptions and various knowledge, skills, and abilities that are commonly used for your job positions.

If you go to onetonline.org and you type in this box, “administrative assistant” for example, and click “Search”, then you will get a list of various jobs that are similar to administrative assistant. We are going to click on “secretary administrative assistant” and then you see an extensive list of all the different skills that are needed for someone to succeed and work competently in this role. It breaks down by tasks, technology skills, knowledge needed, basic skills, abilities and then describes the type of work activity. Here we can see that communicating and interacting with a computer is important as well as communication skills, contact with others and even typing information into a database.

After we see all these different types of skills, knowledge, and abilities that are needed, we can go back to the EmployTest site and click on our pre-employment test list and see the types of lists that we have that can be helpful to measure those types of skills.

Just visit the Test List page, and then we click on Basic Admin skills to see grammar and spelling tests and typing and data entry tests. If we select software test, we then see the various software programs that we have, such as tests for Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Word and general computer skills.

ONET is a very easy way to get in-depth knowledge and information about your job descriptions and you can use that to select the test from our test list. If you have questions about any of that reach out to our team and we would be happy to help.