What’s Psychometric Testing?
More employers are asking “What’s Psychometric Testing, and why should we consider it?” This form of career testing is a critical element in employee recruitment strategies.
Any new hire is a potential risk for a business. You need to know if they’re going to be a hard worker, if they’re smart, and how well they adapt to particular types of jobs. Sometimes, due to increased demand, it’s a necessary risk, but it’s a risk nonetheless. Testing is there to find out the answers to questions like “Does this person get bored easily? How well does this person learn new skills or absorb data? Is this person introverted or extroverted?”
Test Intentions
Answering those questions about a new hire is a critical data point that may slip past resumes and interviews. The wrong hire can cost the business more than twice what they’re paying him in salary in missed sales opportunities or production failures. Psychometric testing offers ways to get the answers to these questions. While it’s not a replacement for the traditional interview and resume process, it’s a good supplement to it. They’re batteries of standardized tests that have been in use for nearly a century, with continual refinements.
What Kinds Of Tests Are There?
The granddaddy of all psychometric tests is the Stanford-Binet standardized IQ test. It’s been the subject of rancorous debate ever since its introduction in the 1910s, before World War I. As a business application it’s not ideal, because it takes several hours to administer, and only measures one type of intelligence. Getting measurables in less than three hours of testing time is where commercial psychometric tests come in.
The most commonly used psychometric test in the business world is the Wonderlic exam, and it’s fairly famous because of the weight the NFL puts on it at the NFL Player Scouting Combine in March. It has a scale from 1 to 50, and measures the ability of a testee to make inferences from sets of data. It’s also used in just about every financial organization in the US as a screening test for potential candidates, most of whom require a score of at least 24 (roughly corresponding to an IQ of 114) to get accepted. More and more staffing agencies are requiring the Wonderlic as well.
Where is The Market For Psychometric Testing?
The primary appeal of psychometric testing, beyond the ability to weed out unsuitable candidates before hiring, is to find out which applicants can reason, draw inferences from limited data, and have mental flexibility. People with those abilities, in abstract reasoning, are strongly in demand in the modern economy, where it’s necessary to be able to reason carefully and quickly.
Other Types Of Tests
Psychometric tests cover the gamut from the more widely known (IQ and its analogs) to social stress tests, to boredom thresholds. A lot of police departments use a type of psychometric test that’s geared to measure stress responses, which can be critical in predicting how someone will react in an emergency.
Another kind of test that gets used is the basic personality test; whether someone is an introvert or extrovert, whether they’re self driven or motivated by the approval of others. These personality inventories are useful for determining how a candidate will ‘fit in’ to a given team environment.