Psychometric testing: What it is, and how it can improve your HR
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If you’ve spent any time recruiting, you’ll likely know this feeling well…
You find a perfectly qualified candidate who makes an unbelievable first impression. They’re walking the walk, they’re talking the talk. “Call off the search!” you tell your colleagues. “I’ve found the chosen one!”
The crow you then eat after watching your proclaimed “chosen one” dramatically underperform and struggle against baseline KPIs, or burnout and quit because they lacked the aptitude for the role and the personality for the organisation.
Now your confidence is in the toilet, your colleagues think your instincts are trash, and you’re back to square one… how could you have done better? How will you do better?
This is where a battery of custom-built psychometric testing can come to the rescue, where you can deliver an aptitude test, a skills and role-specific knowledge test, and a personality test. You can make these accessible online to gather information on candidates’ abilities and traits.
The same approach can be applied to manage internal transfers, and generally managing the teams within your company.
This article is all about how to use psychometric assessments to better your approach to recruitment and HR more generally.
Defining psychometrics in a HR setting
So what are psychometrics? you might be wondering.
If you’d never heard of psychometrics before, you could be forgiven for thinking it sounds kind of made up, but psychometric testing is actually a tool with a long history of helping businesses quantify and contextualise the strengths and traits within individuals which could be useful for their organisation, or worth nurturing within their organisation.
Psychometric testing takes into account people’s innate and learned behaviours and skills through a series of tactical questions, ultimately providing a deeper insight into individuals through their answers – whether they’re employees or candidates.
It’s trying to make sense of the human element of business by turning test results into tangible information. You might describe it as an attempt at making business personal.
The different types of psychometric assessments
So let’s boil down each component of your full battery of psychometric testing.
Aptitude tests
This measures innate qualities in how a person’s mind works, like logic, situational analysis, memory, reasoning, attention to detail, numerical skills, and so on and so forth.
It’s useful to think of an aptitude test as being like an IQ test that’s specific to work, or if it’s one you’ve built yourself, specific to your organisation.
These aptitude tests should be like more specific versions of the ones you’d take at school to get career recommendations. The questions can literally apply to your business, and situations candidates or employees will encounter on the job.
Skills tests
These are a failsafe to make sure the new rocket scientist you’ve hired actually has a credible degree in rocket science.
With basically a global workforce of talent, and more avenues to qualification in some fields than ever before, it’s good to make sure that they really are experts in the fields they’re being hired in, and experts to the level that they could be an asset to your company and the role they’ve applied for.
These don’t need to be full-blown exam questions, but could weed out the people who haven’t retained any industry or degree-specific knowledge, or flag candidates that might have potentially fabricated their application in some way.
Personality tests
The personality test is for assessing people’s values, preferences, tendencies, and general approaches to work.
This is trying to get at the intangibles and determining – as much as possible – if someone is suitable for the position you’re hiring for, and the working environment you’re providing.
How easy is it to create custom psychometric testing for my company?
The good news is, it’s never been easier to custom-build your own psychometric tests.
With the Drimify gamification platform, you have a personality test template to define profiles, and customise the questions and answers to assess their traits and preferences, and you have the quiz template (with right and wrong answers), and you can even turn them into a cohesive user journey by using experience builders like the Dynamic Path™.
This can all be done with no prior experience or specialist expertise. The game engines are there, ready for you to add your design and your questions, answers, and profiles.
How psychometric testing is a game changer in modern HR
Psychometric testing can be beneficial for businesses, employees, and candidates when used appropriately.
It costs a lot to hire the wrong candidate and have to start from scratch, and having some understanding of people’s working styles and preferences can go a long way to being able to support them and create conditions where they can do their best work.
From a candidate perspective, being hired into a position and culture they’re not a good match for is essentially being set up to fail, which can severely knock their confidence in the long run.
As a practice, this has its history in the Myers-Briggs personality test, which was invented during the second world war to help women entering the workforce match with the most suitable jobs.
Taking bias out of the recruitment process and internal promotions
Another major boon for psychometric testing is just the removal of bias.
Yes, nepotism, charisma, and the ability to make a good first impression will still carry a lot of weight, but if personality, aptitude, and skills are being internally assessed, it’s a much more level playing field for everyone.
Let’s make up a fictional company and pretend Bill and Nancy are both in entry level positions, and trying to advance to management level. Nancy is slightly better suited for the job, but Bill is good friends with the head of their department. With psychometric testing, it’s now much harder for Bill to get a manager position over Nancy just because Bill’s better liked by those with authority.
There’s now multiple assessments for them both to take, and the team responsible for making the promotion have much more impartial feedback to factor into their decision making. Maybe Bill is still the right person for the job in their eyes, but if there are psychometric test results claiming the opposite, it at least creates a debate, and potentially a second look.
Similarly, if a hiring manager is looking for a specialist that will have a huge impact on the company’s future, but it’s an extremely niche area, psychometric testing gives them data that can inform their ultimate decision. This means the company is way more likely to hire the right person, but also the candidates who are a little less flashy, and maybe don’t thrive in interview situations, have opportunities to show what they’re bringing in a tangible way.
Nurturing team dynamics and collaboration
Psychometric testing is something you can introduce across your existing workforce to take inventory of the personality types, skillsets, and aptitudes of your current employees.
The results may show patterns with departments where there can be a lot of friction (such as multiple type A personalities), untapped potential, or help inform alternative methods of working that could be beneficial to both staff and the company.
It could also be used to help you put together multidisciplinary teams for special projects. Selecting personality types that should theoretically work best together, while still having the requisite single-mindedness to get things done.
Increasing employee retention and engagement
Again, understanding how people think, their preferences, and how they approach specific situations can only help you improve working conditions and help your people improve their job performance.
Where psychometric testing can really pay dividends on this front is when you have a larger workforce, either in the hundreds or the thousands. While smaller businesses can also benefit from psychometric testing, a team of five to 10 is small enough that you could have an in-person relationship with all of them and have some idea of what they’re about.
It can also work as a tool to help your employees reflect on their approach to their work and their lives generally. If you provide your teams with psychometric testing and related exercises, it can be a great way to encourage self-evaluation and development in their careers, and foster the adoption of a growth mindset, and a more ambitious approach to their role, and future with the company.
How to use psychometric assessments fairly for better outcomes
Of course, psychometric testing isn’t without its limitations.
By its very nature, it’s an attempt to put people into boxes – which people famously don’t like to be put into. The insights of psychometrics will ultimately be limited, and a simplification of what is ultimately very complex: a human being’s personality.
In response to this, we would say that irresponsibly used, fire is incredibly dangerous, but without it, we wouldn’t have the modern world, we’d only inhabit a small portion of the globe around the equator, we would be eating all of our food raw, and we’d have no protection from predators. (We’d also definitely not have survived the last ice age without fire.)
Psychometric assessments, though far less dramatic seeming, in the business realm of recruitment and HR, are kind of like fire. Use them irresponsibly, and you’re going to make a lot of mistakes, but use them responsibly and constantly learn from the results, and they will improve your approach to HR. These limitations are also a good reason to make your own psychometric tests, specific to your company, using an enterprise-grade gamification platform, so they can be optimised as closely as possible to your business’s needs.
They should always be an additional insight to support HR and recruitment decisions, and not as the be all and end all. A good way to think about their results is as circumstantial evidence as opposed to direct evidence.
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