job seeker Archives - iStaffingAgency

Understanding Pre-Employment Personality Tests

Employers in Southern California typically have several candidates to choose from. Pre-employment personality tests ensure an applicant is right for the job and that the job is right for the applicant. Applicants need to understand this as they prepare to be interviewed, tested and examined by potential employers and staffing firms. Pre-employment tests should not be seen as a pass or fail test but rather as an examination to locate the right fit.

Pre-employment personality tests come in many different forms. They might be true/false questionnaires, scaled-response surveys or essay questions. True/false questions typically pertain to specific situations, scaled-response surveys are similar to true/false questions but are ranked from strongly disagree to strongly agree and essay questions are more open ended. Pre-employment tests might be timed to ensure that prospective employees remain honest and are able to think on their feet.

Occasionally prospective employees overlook some of their best qualities. Before taking a personality test job seekers should prepare a detailed list of their personality traits that might interest a future employer. Making this type of list encourages applicants to take an honest look at themselves and determine whether they feel that they are right for the position at hand. It also reduces the chance that they will freeze up when asked questions.

Perhaps the most important advice a job seeker can take when preparing for a personality test is to be honest. Prospective employees should be less concerned with getting a job and more concerned with locating the right job. When applicants give dishonest answers simply because they think it’s what the boss wants to hear, they hurt both parties involved. Managers that go through the process of hiring a less than enthusiastic employee ultimately end up regretting it and the employee is miserable every day that they must work. While finding employment is very important, finding the right job is paramount to finding happiness.

In addition to being honest, applicants should relax when given personality tests that have a bearing on their future employment. While job seekers shouldn’t be so relaxed that they appear unprofessional, they also shouldn’t be so nervous that their thought process completely shuts down. Employers use pre-employment tests to evaluate a person’s disposition and see how well they work under pressure. Keep in mind when facing prospective employment that being prepared, honest and calm is just as important as the results of a personality test.

iStaffing Agency helps place professional candidates into Management, Senior and Executive level positions in Southern California. iStaffing Agency specializes in Human Resources, Accountants, Executives, IT Professionals, Loan Officers and other professional candidates in addition to candidates in the Entertainment and Nonprofit sector. For more information about how iStaffing Agency can help you locate your next career opportunity in Los Angeles County or Orange County, California please contact us today.

Using Craigslist to Find New Hires

Today, Southern California is full of job seekers. When companies decide to hire new employees they have many options. In recent years, Craigslist has built a reputation as a great resource of free and low-cost classifieds online. However, relying on craigslist to fill local job openings might actually cost your company more time and money than you believe. In most cases, using a staffing agency to fill open positions is far more cost and time effective.

Craigslist offers businesses a simple method for posting job listings. Hiring managers can select a city, a category, open an account and post their job listing. The ease of the process was made even more appealing by the fact that job listings could be posted for free. As time passed, Craigslist began charging for job listings in several markets in an effort to filter out fraudulent and frivolous job postings.

However, fourteen years after the launch of Craigslist, the website is losing effectiveness as a recruitment source under the weight of its own success. In Southern California specifically, job seeker traffic has grown exponentially on Craigslist while the number of job postings has fallen. The result is that every single job that is posted on Craigslist is flooded with applicants, creating a backlog of work for hiring managers. Companies both large and small report receiving hundreds of replies to job postings within only 24 hours, however only one or two of these applicants end up being worthy of an interview. Companies must spend multiple hours reviewing the overload of resumes just to find the needle in the haystack.

Another issue with using Craigslist is the lack of customer service. Once a job listing is posted, returning to the website to make edits or remove the listing isn’t difficult if you’ve saved your confirmation email. However, if you require the assistance of a real person you are typically out of luck. Craigslist communicates with its customers solely through email. Because of the size of Craigslist’s database compared to the size of its customer service team, very few customers actually receive replies to their questions.

When companies consider online resources for attracting job candidates the results will typically mirror the quality of the source. In this case it really is true that you get what you pay for, in terms of both quality and the time required to identify qualified applicants.

iStaffing Agency helps Southern California companies locate, screen and place professional candidates into Management, Senior and Executive level positions. iStaffing Agency specializes in Human Resources, Accountants, Executives, IT Professionals, Loan Officers and other professional candidates in addition to candidates in the Entertainment and Nonprofit sector. iStaffing Agency services all areas of Orange County and Los Angeles County. For more information about how iStaffing Agency can help your company with their staffing needs, please contact us today.