Psychometric testing

An effective psychometric assessment tool can add significant value to recruitment and induction processes, helping to avoid costly hiring mistakes and giving managers tools to tailor their training and management style to get the best out of new team members. Peoplekind Consulting have worked with the Selector Insight assessment for nearly 20 years and it’s proved to be a very accurate predictor of performance.

Benefits of testing in recruitment

Reviewing CV’s and conducting interviews doesn’t provide a full picture of candidates. When applying for a job, people obviously present themselves in the best possible light. Effective interviewing techniques can help to paint a more accurate picture, but to really see beneath the surface requires thorough reference checking and testing, including psychometric assessment.

To add more value to the recruitment process, psychometric assessments can be used to benchmark high-performing employees in a particular role to find out if there are any common success factors. For example, Peoplekind identified four key success factors for sales staff in an organization and used that information to assess all future applicants.

What information do psychometric assessments provide?

Selector Insight measures ability (reasoning skills) and provides insight into a candidate’s personal style, their ideal working environment and job, and how they deal with stress. This gives you a framework to assess how they will fit with your role, the team and the working environment. You also get an understanding of what motivates them and how they prefer to learn.

How reliable is the assessment data?

It’s important to allow for some variability depending on how the person is feeling on the day, the purpose of the assessment, etc. That means the true score may be slightly higher or lower than shown in the report. In addition, any assessments that are more than 6 months old should not be relied on.

Is it easy to fake psychometric assessments?

A common objection to using psychometric assessments for recruitment is that it’s easy for candidates to fake the results. However, in a well-designed assessment, candidates will not be able to identify the link between a question and the result it generates. With Selector Insight, there are certain indicators if a candidate is trying to manipulate the results and, in our experience, this happens very rarely. 

Benefits for onboarding

Assessment data is useful not only for selection, but also for a manager to gain insight into how to manage a new team member to get the best results. For example, if a person scores low in orderliness, this indicates they may struggle to plan and organise. Effective management would include regular meetings to help them plan and prioritise.