Why Mechanical Comprehension Tests Are Important For Business Recruitment Strategies
Mechanical Comprehension Tests focus on evaluating a candidate’s understanding of mechanical reasoning and spatial awareness.
Why Mechanical Comprehension Tests Are Important For Recruiters
What Are Comprehension Tests?
Not all businesses know what a comprehension test is or how having these tests in your recruitment strategy helps improve your talent acquisition.
In short, a comprehension test is a reasoning test that focuses on a prospective employees ability and comprehension skills.
The main goal of any type of comprehension test is to understand and evaluate how an interviewee comprehends the passage of information, observing their ability to analyse a set of answers and choose the most suitable one.
Mechanical Comprehension Tests
Due to the industrial revolution 4.0 and the future of skills development within the manufacturing industry, employers are becoming increasingly focused on reducing the skills shortages within hard-skill roles such as manufacturing and engineering.
Mechanical Comprehension Tests come in the form of the Bennett Mechanical (BMCT-II) test and focus on evaluating a candidate’s understanding of mechanical reasoning and spatial awareness.
Spatial Visualisation
While spatial awareness is covered in mechanical comprehension tests, spatial visualisation can be measured as a separate comprehension test.
The spatial visualisation test measures a candidates’ ability to manipulate multi-dimensional figures. The tests used are often cognitive-based test methods and look to understand user performance with various kinds of interfaces.
What do Mechanical Comprehension Tests Cover?
A mechanical comprehension test covers mathematical, physical and technical concepts.
A candidate interviewed is expected to have a basic knowledge of physical and mechanical laws and how these are applied within mechanical engineering roles.
Additionally, a prospective employee is expected and measured on their technical deduction of how machinery works within specific mechanical and engineering roles.
Are Mechanical Comprehension Tests Important for Businesses?
In short, yes.
Research as recent as 2018 by Deloitte has shown that “It takes more than 2 months to fill positions for skilled production workers, and more than 4 months for engineers, researchers, and scientists.”
This is around 25 days longer (roughly 3 weeks more) than the average time it takes to fill a job vacancy.
As a result, the cost to the business can be seen across a variety of departments.
These range from:
HR Resources – time spent receiving CVs, setting up interviews etc.
Engineering Department – time spent interviewing incorrect or inexperienced talent.
Operations – day-to-day performance is impacted and production efficiency reduced while waiting to fulfil a role.
Interestingly, Deloitte’s report further found that jobs in the industry are out there, but the talent pool is suffering from a skills gap.
It’s suggested that the skills gap is as high as 2.4million, contributing to $2.5 trillion in risk towards manufacturing GDP by 2028.
However, a large proportion of these roles are digitally and data-focused, roles surrounding management and quality assurance are also struggling to fill the vacancies.
These roles still require levels of mechanical comprehension to understand and safely assess the quality and safety of operational outputs for businesses.
Identifying Skill Gaps Within Your Business
Skills shortages will naturally vary depending on your business operations, internal processes, talent pool and industry.
This is common and nothing to worry about immediately, however, these gaps will need to be filled in the future for your business to innovate, transform digitally and continue to stay competitive from a business advantage.
For businesses to win when implementing mechanical comprehensive skills tests, they’ll need to identify core critical skills required.
Putting together a skills gap analysis is the first stage in identifying gaps in your business that need filling with talent.
From here on, you can begin to plan with your HR and recruitment team a plan of action on how to fill these gaps with the required talent and grow business operations.
The Benefits of Mechanical Comprehension Tests
Streamline Recruitment Process
Analysis and planning might feel like a heavyweight on resources at the start, but will pay dividends to the business longer term.
By identifying skills gap shortages and implementing mechanical comprehension tests, you’re able to efficiently optimise your companies recruitment and talent identification process.
This will have a commercial impact both shorter-term and longer-term.
Obtain Company Buy-In
During the recruitment process , you can bring in talent already within the organisation to create two-way conversations around the talent/skills needed for innovation and get employee buy-in at all levels of the business.
Upskill from Top-to-Bottom
Additionally, identifying skills gaps and running comprehension tests internally can highlight any areas of opportunity for strengthening current talent.
Here a business may look to re-arrange teams, departments to maximise on their talent pool and upskill current employees to improve the average performance of their operations teams over time.
Please don’t hesitate to Contact Us or visit our Bennett Mechanical Comprehension Test® to learn more about how you could benefit by testing candidates’ spatial perception, mechanical reasoning abilities, and aptitude for learning.