What is a psychometric test and how does it help recruiters?

A psychometric test is a standardized assessment tool used to measure various psychological attributes, such as cognitive abilities, personality traits, and specific skills. These tests are designed to provide objective data about an individual's capabilities, preferences, and potential performance in certain roles or situations.

There are different types of psychometric tests, including:

1. Cognitive Ability Tests: These evaluate a candidate's logical reasoning, verbal and numerical abilities, and problem-solving skills. They help recruiters assess an individual's capacity to learn, adapt, and make sound decisions.

2. Personality Tests: These assess personality traits such as extroversion, conscientiousness, openness to experience, agreeableness, and emotional stability. Understanding a candidate's personality can provide insights into how they might fit within a team and whether they align with the organization's culture and values.

3. Skills Tests: These measure specific skills relevant to the job, such as technical proficiency, language proficiency, or situational judgment. They help recruiters identify candidates who possess the required competencies for the role.

So, how do these tests help recruiters?

1. Objective Assessment: Psychometric tests provide objective data that can supplement subjective impressions formed during interviews. This helps recruiters make more informed decisions based on a candidate's actual abilities and characteristics rather than relying solely on gut feelings or biases.

2. Predictive Validity: Research has shown that psychometric tests have predictive validity, meaning they can accurately predict future job performance. By assessing a candidate's cognitive abilities, personality traits, and skills, recruiters can identify individuals who are likely to succeed in a given role.

3. Efficiency: Psychometric tests are often administered online and can be completed remotely by candidates, saving time and resources for recruiters. Additionally, they can quickly filter out unsuitable candidates, allowing recruiters to focus their efforts on candidates who are more likely to be a good fit for the role.

4. Reduced Bias: Psychometric tests help mitigate biases in the hiring process by providing standardized assessments that treat all candidates equally. This can help increase diversity and fairness in recruitment practices.

Overall, psychometric tests serve as valuable tools for recruiters in identifying candidates who not only possess the necessary skills and qualifications but also have the potential to thrive and contribute positively to the organization's success.

Navigating Success: The Vital Role of Psychometric Tests for Seafarers in Maritime Operations

Psychometric tests for seafarers are important for several reasons, contributing to the safety, efficiency, and overall effectiveness of maritime operations. Here are some key reasons for the importance of psychometric tests for seafarers:

1. Safety at Sea:
   Seafarers work in challenging and often hazardous conditions. Ensuring that individuals possess the psychological traits necessary to handle stress, make quick and accurate decisions, and communicate effectively is crucial for the safety of the crew, the vessel, and the cargo.
   
   
2. Crew Compatibility:
   Psychometric tests can assess interpersonal skills and teamwork. Ensuring that crew members can work well together is essential for the smooth functioning of a ship. Compatibility in a team reduces the likelihood of conflicts and enhances overall job satisfaction.
   
   
3. Stress Management:
   Seafarers often face stressful situations, including adverse weather conditions, long working hours, and isolation. Psychometric tests can identify individuals who are better equipped to handle stress, ensuring that the crew remains resilient and able to perform well under pressure.
   
   
4. Decision-Making Abilities:
   Maritime operations require quick and effective decision-making. Psychometric assessments can evaluate cognitive abilities, problem-solving skills, and decision-making processes, helping to ensure that seafarers are capable of making sound judgments in various situations.
   
   
5. Communication Skills:
   Effective communication is crucial for safe navigation and coordination among crew members. Psychometric tests can assess communication skills, ensuring that seafarers can convey information clearly and receive and understand instructions accurately.
   
   
6. Mental Health and Well-Being:
   The isolation and extended periods away from home can impact the mental health of seafarers. Psychometric tests may help identify individuals who might be more susceptible to mental health challenges, enabling proactive support and intervention.
   
   
7. Regulatory Compliance:
   Many maritime authorities and industry standards require the use of psychometric tests as part of the pre-employment screening process. This helps ensure that seafarers meet the necessary psychological criteria for the specific demands of their roles.
   
   
8. Performance Optimization:
   Understanding the psychological profiles of seafarers can help in optimizing performance by placing individuals in roles that align with their strengths and capabilities. This can lead to increased job satisfaction and overall job performance.

In summary, psychometric tests for seafarers at Psychometrica play a crucial role in enhancing safety, teamwork, and overall operational efficiency in the maritime industry. They contribute to creating a skilled and well-balanced crew that can effectively navigate the challenges of seafaring.

Hiring Using Online Psychometric Tests

Unlike facets such as education, skills, experience, appearance and punctuality, behavioral traits and personality of a candidate can be much more difficult to assess during an interview. Hence, psychometric analyses help us gauge certain nuances of human behavior better and help profile traits and characteristics systematically.

Hiring managers today, rely more and more on psychometric tests which are online during their recruitment process to help give a better overall evaluation of a candidate and hopefully secure the best fit for the role. These tests also help gauge the future performance of a candidate and hopefully improve employee retention by making successful hiring decisions.

Here are a few factors that help understand why recruiters must use psychometric tests online in their recruiting.

1. Standardized Information

When candidates are assessed using standardized procedures, they are assessed using the same criteria and compared against reliable market standards. This makes up for neutrality to the process which is sometimes is falsified when sole internal processes are used. A comparison of candidates using various standardization procedures and valid psychometric assessment tools, helps design a complete profile of these individuals.

2. Valid of all Companies

Testing using psychometric measures not necessarily need to be reserved for larger corporations or organizations looking to recruit fresh graduates. Smaller organizations may use such tolls as well, as part of their overall recruitment strategies. It is important to make sure candidates are being tested for the right traits, small and medium organizations might not necessarily tailor tests quite as much as larger organizations. Rather, they can be used to give a more general idea of candidate’s’ abilities and personality.

3. Provides Overall Feedback

Considering recruitment, interviews are synonymous to getting to know the individual in person so as to decide if he fits the organization’s culture. However, it may not be the only time the candidate shows his best qualities. As personality is a subjective matter, candidates can be manipulative or may not be able to signal their strengths during pressurized interview setups. Psychometric assessments gives a benchmark where one can compare results against other candidates profiled for similar roles. Introducing such tests also provide to give recruiters that extra input, thereby creating a wholesome picture of the candidate in question.

4. Saves Time and Money

Recruiting new staff can take up a lot of valuable time and can also prove to be a costly affair, especially if the best talent isn’t found straight away. Psychometric assessments can save employers both time and money as they provide with effective filtering methods. Psychometric tests used early in the application process can quickly identify those people who will best fit your organization both through their abilities and their personality. In this way, psychometric assessments can contribute in more efficient ways of recruitment

5. Painting a True Picture of Candidates

Psychometric Test can give a very good picture of your candidates – they give an idea of the candidate’s personality, what makes them tick and how they prefer to work in given situations; how they work under pressure, for example, and how they work alone or as part of a team. The very nature of psychometric assessment is that they are difficult to game so the results you get from each test should be true results in that they show you what your candidates are really like in the workplace. This means that you will also know about not only their abilities but how well they are going to get along with other employees within your company.

6. Fair Testing – Nonjudgmental

Standardized approach to recruitment is the sole purpose of recruitment and it is fair for candidates because they go through exactly the same assessments process. Candidates who apply for your job roles might not be getting the same type of interview as the candidates who were interviewed the day before. Psychometric assessments also help candidates to better judge themselves. If you have found their personality really suits your company, however, you might be able to make use of the candidate’s new found strengths elsewhere in the company. In this way, psychometric assessments can be a win-win situation.

7. Flexibility of Usage

Another advantage of psychometric assessments for employers is that they can be slotted in at any time during the application process. Depending upon the size and nature of your organization, they can be used right at the beginning in the form of a fun questionnaire or at various times during the day at assessment centers. Some organizations even run two lots of psychometric assessments, at the beginning and the end of the process, just to compare the results and double check they are employing the right candidate.

8. Measuring Skills and Abilities, Not Just Education

Many organizations still place a lot of emphasis on academic achievement, as well as any previous work experience. This is valuable to a certain extent, however, psychometric assessments can be used to plug a gap in that academic achievements to give you a complete picture of what your candidates are actually capable of in the place of work. Again, on the other side, another advantage of psychometric assessments for employers is that it can reveal to you if a candidate is over qualified for the role they are applying for.

9. Psychometric Assessments and Work Culture

Recruitment is not just about hiring any candidate who has demonstrated they can do the job. Rather, this is obviously a key requirement, you also need to know how well the candidate will fit in with the rest of the team already working for you and how they will operate within your company’s culture. Someone who actually prefers to work alone in a quiet atmosphere, for example, is not going to feel fulfilled or work to their full potential if your company thrives in a fast moving environment which relies heavily on teamwork. Psychometric assessments can help do this both with the personality test and the other tests because you will get an idea of how that person works and what motivates them.

10. Consistency in Recruitment

The biggest advantage that psychometric assessments encourage is – consistency and standardization to hire new candidates. Every candidate is given exactly the same tests and recruiters can use this as a benchmark. Other sides of recruitment and your company’s application process are certainly valid, references are from outside your company and a candidate’s previous workplace might not have had the same values as your own workplace. The previous company might also have been looking for different requirements from their employee.

Relevance of Psychometric Assessment in Today’s Competitive Corporate World

That the human resource is the most critical for an organisation’s efficient functioning, has long been a management truism. That this resource is also an organisation’s most challenging and difficult to manage, is a more covertly, yet universally accepted idea as well!

Organisations have now begun to realise the importance of correct recruitment and deployment of people.

Various different measures and tools have been developed by the HR community to make the selection process as robust as possible. These include:

·        Structured Interviews

·        Case Studies

·        Group Discussions

·        Assessment Centers

·        Psychometric Assessments

Each of these has their own sets of pros and cons and we won’t get into those on this platform. However, we will try to understand the relevance of psychometricassessments in today’s corporate world.

Everyone recognises that recruitment is a resource exhausting, expensive, and time consuming exercise. Yet, one cannot run away from it. While every company has its own approach toward recruitment, the fact remains that recruitment decisions often tend to be subjective and arbitrary. Using a valid and reliable psychometric test that is relevant to the hiring need that you have, can instantly elevate the soundness of your recruitment decision making. Making theright recruitment decision is cost effective in countless ways: it significantly reduces attrition, enables you to recruit people with the right skill sets, thereby also reducing training costs, it cuts down on the time involved in arriving at a decision, and makes the process objective and scientific.

What are Psychometric Tests?

Psychometrics refers to the science of measuring mental capacities and processes. Traditionally psychometric test is a paper pencil test where you given a set of statement or questions or situation to which you have to respond. On the basis you get an output which is usually in the form of a report, which tells you where you stand across those particular traits, qualities, skills, or attitudes that the test claims to measure. This is the traditional version. Today more and more have gone online. So you can simply log on to a certain site, take the test online, you get your report in your email box usually within a period of 24 to 48 hours.

Some Typical Psychometric Tests

·        Personality Assessments / Behavioural Assessments

·        Cognitive /Aptitude Assessments

·        Skills Assessments

·        Values / Motivation Assessments

While the Western corporate world has long been investing heavily in psychometric assessments as one of the parameters to aid in the right job-person match, psychometrics have been slow to gather momentum in India’s corporate milieu. Key reasons for this have been:

·   Concern about whether the international tests are relevant for the Indian organisations

·        High costs of well-known global psychometric tools, making them unviable to be used on a large scale in Indian organisations.

Relevance in Today’s Competitive World

·        Speed and Efficiency: Psychometric assessments provide a quick method of getting more information about employees. The tests, several of which can also be done online, have a time frame ranging from 10 to 45 minutes. Most reports are turned around in 24-48 hours. This appeals greatly to today’s “quick result” generation of managers and decision makers. Assessment can also be administered on a larger group of people simultaneously, thus bringing in more efficiencies.

·        Objective Assessment: Eliminates subjectivity in assessment and selection decisions. Tests consistently throw up results based on the individual’s responses to the test items rather than subjective impressions or evaluations formed by interviewers.

·        Industry Benchmarks: Psychometric tests are normed against a larger population of similar kinds of candidates. Thus, it provides organisations with an insight into where an individual lies in comparison to the industry.

·        Developed by Experts: Psychometric tests are developed by trained psychometricians after rigorous research, and by using psychometric and statistical principles of the highest order. Thus, they bring in a high level of accuracy, precision and depth to the competencies being assessed.

·        Highly Cost Effective: For many organisations, the biggest advantage that psychometrics have to offer is that they are easy on the budget. Compared to many other third party methods (assessment centers, in basket exercises, panel interviews), psychometric tools enable huge saves to the organisation, while at the same time, maintaining consistent and stable predictive ability.

Ms. Samindara Hardikar – Sawant

Clinical Psychologist

Psychometrica | Disha Counseling Center| Career Pathways

Samindara@psychometrica.in