With the age of technology in full swing, opportunities abound for companies to adopt new, modern techniques to help improve their business processes. One such technique, particularly useful in the hiring process, is known as a psychometric-based assessment. Psychometrics refer to a type of test or assessment that analyzes and recognizes patterns of behavior and measurable personality traits. The science of psychometrics integrates the fields of psychology and mathematics to create algorithms that analyze scores. This is particularly helpful when assessing various cognitive and behavioral ability levels. With the help of psychometrics, employers can identify the best candidates for roles that are hard to fill with traditional interviewing or resume screening methods.
Because psychometric assessments provide measurable results, it doesn’t require extensive training on the part of hiring managers or HR professionals to learn how to administer the behavioral tests. However, a general understanding of how to apply results is useful in extracting meaningful insights that can be applied to the selection and hiring process. One such benefit is understanding how the abilities of a potential hire might integrate with the capabilities of others already on the team or in the office.
To achieve successful outcomes using psychometric-based assessments, it’s important to start with having everyone already employed at the company take the psychometric exam. This provides a baseline understanding of the current personnel distribution and how future employees would fit in when joining a team. You’ll then want to make sure that future prospects take the psychometric exam you’ve chosen to use. The results of the tests can help you avoid internal conflicts – not placing employees with poor behavior patterns with job opportunities that highlight those poor behaviors.
Psychometric tests can determine these things by assessing key traits, aligning with top performers in the role. For example, traits such as verbal reasoning (communication), logic, and making on-the-fly judgments, may be appropriate for a sales negotiator but not necessarily someone who has to conform to a script. Psychometric assessments vary in their areas of measurement. That’s why it’s always important to align your chosen assessment with the types of traits you want to measure. This may include one or more of the following:
- Psychometric testing that measures logical reasoning is valuable across the board, in every position. Many positions require special skills or knowledge, but virtually every position can be executed better when common sense is applied. For example, when hiring an executive assistant, logical reasoning benefits the assistant in executing his or her role, as well as the executive being assisted. Logical reasoning would be utilized when coordinating schedules, juggling conflicting priorities, and executing day-to-day tasks with little to no oversight.
- Assessments with a verbal reasoning section are designed to assess one’s ability to analyze and understand written passages. While this might seem insignificant, it is actually very important to know that a candidate is able to communicate effectively through a written medium when so much of our business communication takes place over email and texting.
- Measuring a candidate’s ability to make on-the-fly judgments can be useful in a fast-paced environment where a position allows for certain levels of autonomy. For example, in a call center or customer service environment, a person’s ability to quickly discern the true nature of an issue or concern and implement their own judgment to either apply a fix or escalate the issue to the next level of management can save multiple people time, effort, and frustration, both internally and externally.
- A numerical reasoning test is a type of psychometric used to measure a candidate’s numerical aptitude and their ability to interpret, analyze and draw conclusions from sets of data. It’s clear to see how this type of testing would be beneficial when filling a finance-related role, such as accountant or internal auditor. However, the applications of this aptitude can reach far beyond traditional finance roles to company departments such as sales for use in interpreting revenue and territory data, or marketing for understanding and applying conversion metrics to new strategies.
These examples are just a small sample of ways to use psychometric assessments to gain valuable insights into human behavior. These traits or characteristics have implications in work styles and aptitude. At Talexes, our assessments provide objective and applicable results that are easy to understand. Our goal with these psychometric exams is to help you fill open positions with the right candidates, place quality people, and build successful companies. Explore our assessments and learn more.
