Pre-Employment Skills Assessment Using “Training” Simulation
The Problem
I once had a job applicant, he could talk a cat off a fish boat.
That’s what an old hand working on the Gulf Coast told me (where there are, of course, real cats and real fish boats).
Sadly, a study conducted just last year [1] found that
… nearly half of people (48%) have been dishonest or considered telling a lie on their resume.
Worse, as described in [2], some companies are now turning to AI (Artificial Intelligence) to scan and evaluate cv’s, and so key elements might be “missed”:
If companies apply the same due diligence and process quality to the sourcing of their procurement and supply chain professionals as they do to their suppliers and vendors, they will be assured of acquiring the best talent with the right interpersonal skills to integrate to their organization and engage with their supply chain partners. People matter the most. Don’t shortcut this most critical supply chain process.
And that’s why it’s so important to have Human Resources perform background checks, and conduct in-person interviews.
But if you’re recruiting heavy equipment operators, “dishonesty” typically takes the form of exaggerated qualifications that Human Resources can’t evaluate. For just that reason, it’s often the case that a job applicant’s level of proficiency is only “discovered” when work begins, on the job at the controls of your equipment, under the watchful eye of your staff.
And if the job applicant is “exaggerating”, that opens the door to all kinds of problems including damage to your equipment, personal injury, or worse (along with insurance claims).
About Credentials (Certification)
In many industries, there are standardized “Demonstration of Skills Tests” to prove that you know what to do, and that’s typically called “certification”. This is much like a car driving license that proves that you can (safely) drive a (real) car of any kind, anywhere.
But for lift trucks, OSHA requires that the employer “double check”, by making you “re-certify”
- at the controls of the employer’s equipment
- doing the employer’s kind of lift truck work well enough
and this typically needs to be re-done every three years.
Of course this is expensive, because
- you need a real lift truck
- somewhere to put it to work
- staff to evaluate what you do
Well it’s one thing to make that investment in a lift truck operator you know and trust, because you’re expecting that all will go well, i.e. someone who was certified before will most likely become certified once again. (Some Simlog customers also look to their “training” simulator to help “casual” operators first refresh their operating skills in a simulated world.)
But when your job applicant is a “stranger”, now there’s a chance that your investment in that Demonstration of Skills Test will be “lost”. And perhaps many times, if multiple job applicants just aren’t sufficiently qualified. (Remember the “exaggerations” on their resumés.)
In fact, this is why many of our customers systematically use their “training simulator” to have job applicants prove in the simulated world first that they are truly ready to do what needs to be done in the real world.
About “Training” Simulation and Benchmarking
At Simlog, we’re in the “helping you learn” business, and our products are primarily used to prepare for the real world work in a simulated world. For that reason, our Instructional Designs begin with tasks that are extra “easy”, and then slowly but surely add complexity to eventually “reproduce” real world work.
To that end, each Simulation Module “step” features dozens of Performance Indicators that measure how quickly and how carefully simulated work is performed, creating a “portrait” that is truly diagnostic, instead of just a pass/fail score.
Typical Simlog customers look to their best operators to generate simulation results that then become targets for everyone else, using this Simlog guidance. And that’s because if you can do real world work well, then (of course) you can do simulated work well.
(And at Simlog, we work closely with domain experts to ensure that this happens, i.e. that experts in the real world are “still” experts in Simlog’s simulated world.)
In this way, when you can do as well, at the simulator, as the experts (because your simulation results are now like the target values), that’s “evidence” that the simulator has taught you what you need to learn, and so it’s time to “graduate” to real world work.
Indeed, with targets in place, it becomes possible to benchmark lift truck operations because everyone at the simulator performs exactly the same work, and that work is evaluated in exactly the same way, to make possible true “apples and apples” comparisons. (Some Simlog customers call this a proficiency “audit”.)
Pre-Employment Skills Assessment with “Training” Simulation
Well the very same benchmarks (target values) generated by your best operators can also be used for what Simlog customers often call “pre-employment skills assessment”. But there’s a “catch”, what industrial psychologists call Predictive Validity [3].
Stated simply, good predictive validity means that the skills learned in the simulated world transfer to the real world. And that only happens when the “look and feel” in the simulated world faithfully reproduces the “look and feel” in the real world.
Otherwise, your real world experts will struggle in the simulated world, meaning that your “training” simulator can’t be used for pre-employment skills assessment. Practically, the simulation software might be “deficient”, i.e. what you see (simulation graphics) and how things move (simulation physics) just aren’t “right”.
But the limitations might be elsewhere. For example, many companies have reported problems using products that rely on VR Headsets instead of “big screen” displays.
About Qualifying “Temps”
In many industries, customers rely on “temps”, i.e. operators provided by a staffing agency, to manage extra work. And here again, much like for pre-employment skills assessment, the same “training” simulation can be used to “qualify” those “temps”, to ensure that they’re truly “ready” to help you with your kind of lift truck doing your kind of work.
(Indeed, that’s why some staffing agencies have become Simlog customers, to “double check” the proficiency of their operators before sending them to you.)
The Bottom Line
Whether you’re looking to hire new operators, or taking on “temps” provided by a staffing agency, it’s always important to qualify proficiency. And with Simlog, the same “training” simulators can also help you do just that.
Here’s what the Operations Manager at a Simlog customer told us:
Human Resources, who conduct the interviews [with job applicants] really don’t have any experience in what an operator should or shouldn’t do. The [training] simulator allows them to actually put the [job] applicant in a seat and see. It’s really a very small amount of money when you consider the benefit, we get out of it.
And that’s how, at one Simlog customer, a Training Specialist “discovered” that a job applicant didn’t know how to operate a stand up lift truck, despite claiming to have lots of (real world) experience. (He was not hired.)
References
[1] “Job Seeker Insights Survey”, Resumé Genius, https://resumegenius.com/blog/job-hunting/job-seeker-insights-survey
[2] “How will AI know from a resumé that a person is personable?”, Supply Chain Management Review, May 19, 2025.
[3] Ericsson, A. (editor), The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance, Cambridge University Press, June 2006.