Tips for Choosing the Right Psychometric Assessment

How to Recruit Top Performers with Psychometric Profiling

Why Use People Assessments and Psychometric Profiling for Recruitment?

What Are You Measuring?  What Do You Want to Achieve?

If you are considering psychometric assessments to help you select high calibre people, bear these points in mind:

• Personality Tests - Relying on a personality-type, or DISC-based test in the recruitment process to predict performance is misleading. They only measure one thing - ‘personality' - the preferences of the person you are assessing (eg I am more extrovert than introvert') and the way their behaviour might impact on their work, or on others. These products are helpful, but provide insufficient insight into an individual's potential and capability in a role.
• Personality Tests Will Only Compare the Candidate with Him or Herself - Most personality-type tests simply accept answers and do not compare the candidate to others or the role in question - it is inadvisable to use these ‘ipsative' tests for recruitment.  A far superior assessment is one that is'normative'and compares the candidate to a) the UK population, b) your top performers in the role and c) the job requirements.  Capturing the qualities of top performers in your organisation is the critical difference to helping you on the path to greater success.
• Measuring Honesty on How Candidates Portray Themselves - How is a candidate's honesty measured? It is essential that you measure the reliability of the candidate's answers by having a ‘distortion' score - most personality-type tests do not include this essential feature.
• Cognitive Tests Tell You How Intelligent Someone Is - They Will Not Tell You Whether They Will Be Successful in a Given Job - Measuring intelligence is a good predictor of the ability to learn. Intelligent people might be able to do the job, but may lack vital attributes, or even the interest, to engage, or be successful in the role. Choosing people because they 'can do' the job will not guarantee success. Nevetheless, measuring cognitive ability is three times as effective in predicting future performance as relying on a candidate's past experience, so it is useful, but you can do more.....
  
  
• Check for a High Reliability Coefficient Score - The British Psychological Society suggests that an acceptable level of reliability for psychometric assessments is - Ability/Aptitude Tests: .80 Personality Tests: .70. This means that the data is 80% and 70 % accurate respectively.  (Most DISC-type products are around 50% accurate). Reliability refers to consistency of measurement and is vital in psychometric assessment.  You must be able to measure the same candidate on different occasions and obtain the same results, otherwise there is something wrong with the tool.  If there is a lack of reliability, there is a lack of consistency in the scores that test respondents receive and, as a result, the interpretation of their profile of behaviours and abilities changes. No test can claim to be 100% reliable - neither can any method of assessment. 
• Validity - Validity means "Is the test fit for purpose? Are we using the right measuring instrument? By measuring content validity, you are ensuring that there are enough suitable questions to measure what the assessment claims to measure. If assessments are being used in a ‘norm referenced' manner, construct validity studies are essential to determine the sample size of respondents; on whom it was conducted and whether the criteria was both reliable and valid.
• Rigorous Testing - A psychometric tool which has been rigorously tested will prove invaluable.  Some assessments have a sample size of 3,000.  Our latest sample involved 400,000 people worldwide.
• Occupational Interests - Finding Out About A Person's Motivation- Identify what type of work really interests an individual. People who enjoy their work have high levels of engagement, productivity and retention. This is an valuable part of an employee assessment and give you further insight into their suitability for the role in question.  Whether they want to do a job is different from whether they can do it.

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If you have any questions you'd like to ask, please feel free to call us on 0845 600 1556.  We know it is confusing - everyone thinks that assessments are all the same.  Now you know they are not.....