In hiring, you are always locked in competition with other employers (whether you remember that fact or not.) Ultimately, your success is determined by what you and your organization can offer, what a candidate can offer your organization, and how you can work together to make great things happen. It’s like you are in a tango dance competition, but in the competition you are a contestant,not the judge.

If you think the era of human sacrifice is over, think again. Humans are sacrificed every day on the altar of pre-employment testing. Hey, I'm not saying that all pre-employment tests are uniformly bad, I'm making the far more reasonable argument that most small organizations who rely on testing are worshiping a false god. (There, see? Wasn't that less incendiary?)

You know the drill. You post a job ad and 300 people apply. You are certain that, at best, there are five qualified people in that stack of resumes, so what's the fastest way to find them? Some employers ask job seekers to jump through a hoop before committing any time to them. The hoop might involve a pre-employment test, performing a work-related task like writing something, or even asking something really time consuming like developing a business plan in order to apply for a job.