Psychometrics – Unveiling More
Psychometric tools can be helpful additions to any objective assessment process, be it for recruitment or development. They can tap into individual strengths, style, motivation, ability or interests. So to clarify, psychometric is the umbrella term for any standardised assessment, including personality profiling and ability testing.
The insight gained from these tools is most powerfully used to inform an interview, or provide a focus for development. A deep-dive interview based on a personality profile can be extremely eye-opening and reveal more about the drivers and behaviours of the external hire or internal promotion or development candidate you are working with.
We work closely with a number of psychometric test publishers to select the best tool for the particular needs of our clients. And the joy of being an independent consultancy is that we are not tied to any specific product: we’re free to select the very best tools for your circumstances. We only use tests that have been rigorously developed and empirically researched to demonstrate accuracy, fairness and relevance.
The depth and breadth of tools we have access to is extensive, but in summary we can break down these tools into three categories.
Personality Questionnaires are psychometrics that look at behavioural preferences, that is, how you like to work. They are not concerned with your abilities, but how you perceive the way you relate to others, how you deal with feelings and emotions and manage under pressure. There is no right or wrong in behavioural style, although some behaviour may be more or less appropriate to certain situations, which can be further explored in a deep-dive interview. We can help you take a personality profile report and build a bespoke interview guide for HR or the hiring manager to better understand the candidate.
Strengths Profiles tend to be used more in development than recruitment settings, as they are asking individuals to self-select their natural strengths, which can be misleading for a hiring manager. These tools tend to ask people to identify their combined enjoyment, ability and high-frequency behaviours, suggesting those things they may be naturally gifted in.
Ability Tests are psychometrics concerned with very specific skills. They tend to involve multiple choice answers where this time there is a right or wrong response. Your answers are then compared with a large group of people who have taken the test before and your result is benchmarked against that group. Verbal, numerical and logical reasoning skills are still scoring high in predictive validity studies, suggesting they are a strong predictor of success in professional and managerial roles.
The most critical thing to deciding what, if any, psychometrics you use, is the role success criteria and your objective in looking for a measure. Once you know what you’re looking for, you can decide on the best assessment tools.
Have a chat with us about what you’re wanting to achieve and we can advise on the different tools out there that might be most useful. And if you need trained experts to administer the tools for you, provide reports and deep-dive interview guides or candidate reports, we can do all of that too.
The range of products we use is constantly increasing, so do please contact us to find out if we are trained in a specific product you want to use. As examples, we have trained experts in:
