Psychometric assessments are tools used to objectively assess an individual’s personality traits, aptitude, intelligence, abilities, and behavioural style. Psychometric assessments are widely used in career counselling and employment to match a person’s skills and personality to an appropriate career or role. Psychometric assessment is one of the oldest assessment tools used to make better, faster, and more accurate talent acquisition and management decisions.
In recent years, psychometric assessment tools have become a standard hiring practice, with many companies now using psychometric assessment as part of their recruitment and hiring process. Psychometric testing can be an effective tool for determining your candidates’ strengths and abilities. However, it must be used with caution and should not be the only way to assess their capabilities.
Why Use Psychometric Assessments?
Psychometric Assessments assists organisations in hiring the right people, as it reveals candidates’ strengths and weaknesses, and it provides insights for you on the best fit for the candidates based on your available roles.
In recruitment, psychometric assessment tools provide more detailed and insightful information than traditional assessment methods. They can aid in determining aptitude or personality type, as well as investigating an individual’s communication style, emotional intelligence, and behaviors as they relate to the workplace.
While there is no doubt that appearance influences whether you like someone right away, it has little bearing on how they will perform for you in a role. Psychometric assessment tools help you assess the important competencies in candidates, and gives you indication of how well they will perform on the role.
Diversity is critical to an organisation’s success. Psychometric Assessments helps you hire people from different backgrounds and regions, as tests can be deployed to all kinds of people and from anywhere, increasing the chances of having diverse candidates.
The right people in the right roles can make or break day-to-day operations. Psychometric assessments extend beyond first impressions.
Using psychometric tests during the selection phase of your recruitment can help reduce cognitive hiring bias. Everyone is biased in some way, and having assessments to rely on throughout the recruitment process allows businesses to combine relevant data and intuition to make the best hiring decisions possible.
Hiring wrongly is very costly to any organisation. Apart from the money costs, it can dampen the morale of existing employees, while hampering the image of the organisation. Psychometric assessments help to reduce the chances of hiring the wrong candidate as the tests help you match the candidates to the right roles. When the right candidates occupy the right roles, the turnover rate is kept at a minimum.
Top Psychometric Assessment Tools
Candidates are frequently judged based on their qualifications rather than the specialist skills they may possess, resulting in a mismatch between a job’s required previous training and the types of skills that would be appropriate and valuable to a role.
In this situation, psychometric assessment tools are advantageous because it allows an organisation to learn about an employee’s character and skills.
Here are 3 top tools used for psychometric assessment;
- Personality Assessment tool
- Cognitive ability
- Behavioural Assessment
Personality Assessment Tool
Personality assessments are used to measure the characteristic patterns of traits that people exhibit in various situations. These tests are intended to extract information on a person’s thoughts, opinions, features, motives, behavioural tendencies, and values.
This test can help predict how a person will react in different situations. There are different types of personality tests, viz-a-viz.
- Dark Personality: Dark personality traits are undesirable qualities that hurt employees, organisations, and clients. Examples include; Opportunism, Self-Obsession, Insensitivity, Temperamental, Impulsiveness and Thrill-Seeking.
- Positive Personality: This assessment assists in identifying and accessing key personality traits that can influence cultural fitness, trainability, and job preference. An example includes curiosity, compassion and organisation.
Cognitive Ability
A cognitive ability test measures mental performance. This test assesses a person’s ability to think rationally and analyse and draw logical conclusions from any given situation. Some cognitive psychometric assessments include;
- Inductive Reasoning: This type of psychometric tool assesses a candidate’s ability to think systematically, usually through visual sequences.
- Logical Reasoning: these tests assess a person’s ability to think logically. The tests are comparable to diagrammatic testing. However, they do not require the usage of diagrams.
- Verbal Reasoning: Written excerpts, usually with a multiple-choice answer style, will be used in verbal psychometric exams to assess a candidate’s understanding and comprehension skills.
- Numerical Reasoning: numerical psychometric assessment is used to examine a candidate’s ability to work with numbers swiftly and efficiently.
There is usually a minimum score on these types of tests, which can be used to define an individual’s cognitive level.
Behavioural Assessment
A behavioural assessment is a tool designed to measure a person’s behavioural pattern and choices. It is used to observe, understand, explain and predict a person’s behaviour. Candidates must demonstrate behavioral competence in one or more tasks that are related to their job responsibilities and simulate an actual workplace environment in order to pass behavioral assessments.
This is because behavioral tests assess behavioral competencies. Individuals’ behavioral competencies include their knowledge, skills, and personality traits. Such competencies are essential elements of a job that are visible and observable in workplace behavior. Behavioral competencies differ depending on job role and level. Each behavioral competency can be assessed using a unique set of behavioral tests, the results of which can help with workforce planning.
Example of exercises used to test behavioural competencies include:
- Case Study Analysis
- Role Plays
- Group Exercises
- Interviews
- Presentations
- Analytical Exercises
- Inbox/In-tray Exercises
- Situational Judgement Tests
Looking for a reliable partner to help you deploy psychometric assessments for your candidates? With our 18 years’ experience, valid psychometric assessment tools and high level of expertise, we can help you hire the best talent through the use of psychometric assessments. Schedule a consultation today.
Akindele Afolabi
Director, Workforce Resourcing
