Psychometric Assessments: What Are They & Why Are They Important?

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Psychometric assessments are used to evaluate the candidates’ skills, personalities, attitudes, and knowledge. They typically contain multiple choices to save time for both the recruiters and the candidates. This type of assessment is sometimes performance-based and evaluates likability where the candidates need to solve different kinds of numerical, graphical, and verbal problems. 

Psychometric Assessments: What Are They & Why Are They Important?

What are the different types of psychometric assessments?

There are three main types of psychometric assessments: achievement, aptitude, and personality assessments. Although each of them has different traits to judge candidates, they all help find out the candidate’s ability.  

Achievement assessments

This assessment measures a persons knowledge, cognitive skills or accomplishment in a particular file.  

The achievement assessments are further divided into different types to be used in a specific scenario, including survey battery (a junior level assessment), single survey achievement (single area of expertise), and diagnostic achievement (focus on the individual’s achievement from a low level to an expert). 

Read more: Everything you need to know about Talent Management

Aptitude (cognitive abilities) assessments  

If the achievement assessment focuses on the employee’s knowledge, the aptitude assessment measures the individual’s ability to acquire a specific skill and the way they practice these skills in their life, such as learning a new language or managing a group of people. 

Aptitude assessment also has a wide range of variations: general aptitude, verbal non-verbal aptitude, and quantitative aptitude assessments.  

Personality assessments  

Personality is how you observe and react to a particular problem in your life. The assessment evaluates a person’s attitude towards a specific problem from which the recruiters can decide whether not to make hiring call. 

Read more: Why the MBTI test is as useful as the astrology 

Why should employers use psychometric assessments? 

First of all, choosing the right person for the job has long been a pressing problem that many companies and hiring managers have to face. A poor selection may lead to disastrous consequences for both the employee and the company. Unsuitable candidates can cause a loss in productivity, revenues, and other issues like rising absenteeism and even reduced morale.  

Moreover, this assessment technique is a more valid method than a traditional interview because it can be highly predictive of the candidate’s future job performance.  

Lastly, the organisation’s performance model can be developed based on the results of the psychometric assessments. A good psychometric assessment will allow you to determine talented individuals.  

Read more: What Organisations Need to Know about the Candidate Experience.

Many employers choose psychometric assessments as the go-to recruiting tool prior to requesting the candidates to come in for an interview.

Three main benefits of the psychometric assessments

An understanding of skills and competencies  

The psychometric assessments provide the employers with a deep understanding of their candidates’ personalities and cognitive skills. Additionally, the employers can identify the high performers but do not have the interview skills, so they cannot show their skills and competencies in an interview situation.  

Save time and cost   

Instead of organising many rounds of interview in the traditional way, using psychometric assessments can help save both the recruiters and the candidate’s time prior to the selection process. The recruiters just need to call the most suitable people to participate in the face-to-face interview round.  

Reduce attrition and improve engagement  

According to Jodette Cleary, Chief People Officer of HiPages Group: “We have declined attrition in our teams, increased employee satisfaction and have seen better performance.” Cleaery stated since the introduction of the customised role-fit psychometric test as part of the recruitment process for the sales and services team, the results have been significantly improved. Another benefit according to Cleary is that the assessments help HiPages managers to understand their new team members’ demands and be better at managing and developing them. 

Read more: What Should Your Employee’s Development Plan Contain? (P.1)

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