Impact of Psychometric Assessment on HR Practices

1.  Role of Psychometric Testing. Human Resource department plays a pivotal role in overall performance of any organization and to remain competitive it is necessary to have competent human resource employed at every department. In wake of such challenging environment, where, HR personnel are continuously trying to identify skills and potential of people to develop a talent pool. Psychometric testing has proved to play an important role in assisting HR personnel in this endeavor.Psychometric testing is an effective tool in assessing human behaviors, which as a result helps in ascertaining the chances of a person to succeed in a particular role.

2.  Effectiveness of Psychometric Testing. A psychometric test provides HR personnel with cost effective, scientific and objective method to assess people’s attitudes, beliefs, values, competencies and personalities. It follows a statistical approach to provide objective assessments. These assessments are derived from different inputs taken from the candidate in the form of questionnaires, verbal, non-verbal tests, scales and IQ/ EQ tests.

3.     Reliability and Validity of Psychometric Testing. According to past studies and experience of many organizations in human resource management it has been proven that psychometric tests are more reliable and valid as compared with other techniques. Moreover, studies indicate that psychometric tests are about four times more effective than interviews. The reason why this method of individual assessment has become popular and widespread is because it uncovers valuable information which was earlier not possible and mostly HR personnel used to rely on gut feeling, which sometimes proved to be fatal.

4.      Selecting Best-fit Candidate for a Particular Role.   Psychometric tests are designed to measure the suitability of a candidate specific to a role in presence of given requirements. The task of HR personnel is to determine actual cognitive abilities and personality profile of a prospect with those essentially required by the organization to carry out the task. This challenging taskof identifying important attributes like team work abilities, leadership qualities, interpersonal skills, analytical and decision making skills are very important to increase effectiveness of an organization is best attained by psychometric testing. As per the statistics it has been reported that about 80% of US Fortune 500 organizations and 75% of UK’s top 100 organizations make use of psychometric testing.

5. Opponents and Proponents of Psychometric Testing. There have been a debate on the effectiveness of psychometric testing and opponents argue that gut feeling of an interviewer and other conventional methods of testing cannot be set aside, and question the reliability and validity of psychometric testing methods and tools. But on the other hand the proponents of psychometric testing argue that it’s an unbiased, objective and fair method of testing, where all candidates get equal opportunity, with similar method of testing, like standardized questionnaires conducted in a controlled environment. These psychological assessments are not subjective and are not affected by tester’s personal beliefs.

6.    Conclusion.    To conclude above discussion we may reach a consensus that there are no quick fixes, when it comes to dealing with human resource, it is not wise to stick to any one type of method but an array of tools both psychometric and traditional approaches customized, to fulfill a given situation is a perfect remedy.

Individual Psychometric Testing

There are large numbers of psychometric testing batteries that are used for individual personality testing to assess individual’s personality and to compare it with the competencies required for the job. It is important for development and selection of candidate’s personality. This personality profiling is a life time process that is updated from time to time and thus record is maintained regarding individual’s personality that helps organization during time of training or promotion. This psychometric testing profile helps in almost all areas whether person is in some educational institute or an employee of some organization. The battery includes

Interpersonal style: It is very important to assess interpersonal styles in psychometric testing wherever a person is working or performing any tasks. This involves identifying communication pattern of an individual i.e. how he communicates with his mates, how he interacts with him, how he controls his emotions during hard times, how he deals with anxiety or nervousness, how responsive he is towards criticism, how open he is towards negative thinking etc. 

Thinking and problem solving style: This psychometric testing battery helps in assessing individual’s thinking pattern i.e. his ability to pick things quickly, to think strategically about the problem and to draw conclusions immediately. This portion of psychometric testing also involves individual’s problem solving skills i.e. how he looks at problem, how he faces the challenge and what are the arrangements for problem solving.

Coping and adaptability: It helps in identifying individual’s thinking pattern, his emotional stability his coping style patterns, how much resilient a person is, how he deals with problems, how he adapt to new situations etc.

Team roles style: This individual profiling of psychometric testing measures how a person behaves, contribute and inter-relate with people in group form.

Subordinate roles: This type of psychometric testing helps to identify how person behaves, how he act and react and how he performs when he is working as a subordinator. 

Influencing style: This psychometric testing battery helps to identify individual’s style when he is working in power, authority or manipulative position. For examples it identifies whether a person is challenger, collaborator, guider or listener etc.

Leadership style: This psychometric testing portion helps to identify how individual provides direction or implement plans or motivate roles. It helps to identify specific leadership style of an individual i.e. whether he is charismatic or transformational or authoritative leader.

Career themes: This psychometric testing identifies individual way of thinking or acting when he is choosing a career or developing a career or changing a career or building a career.

Personal areas of strength: This is most interesting part of psychometric testing in personality profiling. It involves identifying individual’s personality most strongest or potential area of personality. Examples are person’s personality is one of any type of given choices i.e. ambitious, adventurous, action-oriented, analytical, artistic, athletic, empathetic, energetic etc. there are large number of personality strengths that presents wide variety of individual’s characteristics.

Overview Of Psychometric Testing Patterns

This article is specially written to list down the different sections of a psychometric test and their important tips which will help you in learning more efficiently than what you are doing till now.

Verbal reasoning as a psychometric test area-

This part has many ways to assess your verbal skills, related to the use of language and your understanding about their associations with specific rules to follow. As many of you might have knowledge that grammar is very complex and contains a set of rules to remember. Here are the different patterns of questions you would find in a psychometric test.

1. Two lists of three words each will be given to you to find two words from each list, the words must have very strong bond of meanings. Example is given below-

Pond	Fish
Frog	Flower
Tree	Mud

The exercise is called word link. Almost 5 to 10 similar questions are presented in a test from each section. Another exercise is word link with synonyms. The set of examples are here-

“Genre is to class as:

obsolete is to

A. modern

B. outmoded

C. watchful

Deceit is to fraud as:

decision is to

A. conclusion

B. solve

C. indecision”

The objective is to pull out the same meaning of answers. The word link exercise can be printed for you in a test to pull out opposite meanings word or referred to as word link antonyms. See the examples-

“Respect

A. Admire

B. Despise Answer

C. Exalt

Disgrace is to honour

as alarmist is to

A. optimist Answer

B. scaremonger

C. outright”

Next exercise is finding new word; you will see a list of three words written separately in a row. The work is to make a new word using last letter of a word and starting letters of the word next to it in a row list. This really needs mental approach to answer.

“result motivation lyric”

Answer

Then word swapping is another technique of the verbal psychometric testing pattern. You will be given sentences in which word switching is required, the exchange of words is asked in the sentence to allow yourself to modify it and make it sensible. The sentence will look like-

“Breaking up to hard is do.”

So, is needs to be shuffle with hard in the given sentence to make it sensible. The use of common sense is not difficult for native English learners and candidates.

You can see the parts are a mix of easy and hard sections. Sometimes, a lengthy statement will also printed to test you like this one:

“Book publishing is big business, the industry is worth £4 billion and more than 12,000 books are published in the UK a year and each third of which are exported.”

In the same way, sentence sequencing can be asked, where you need to reorganize styles of paragraph to read it in flow with all accurate series, example include-

“A. Pluto is the ninth and the most distant from the sun.

B. It is tiny compared with the giants Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus which have massive, dense, gaseous atmospheres.

C. Our solar system has nine planets formed from gas and dust left over after the sun was formed.”

Complete sentence with best words, this section contains sentences as a question with more than one words or pair of words to decide from. Only one word can be adjusted into the sentence for better reading and comprehension. You need to place an answer below the question in a box.

“A rescue plan for Village Leisure, the failing/falling media company, was

agreed by shareholders at an extraordinary meeting/moratorium”

Recall fill in the blanks, this time with more brainy side, the use of English will be measured by this exercise where you need to choose the word which provides clarity in sentence, there may be more than one to fix in a sentence and list might contain more than one correct answers, look for the words which provides clarity.

“Which of the following words can be a preposition?

A. location

B. no Answer

C. in

D. position

Children please don’t make so much noise. __A__.

1. I am concentrating.

2. I concentrate. Answer

3. While I concentrate”

Choosing the correct language answer is the task here, you need to think extra smartly to win this one.

“Which sentence if any contains an error?

A. Before the meeting he greeted both the Company Secretary and

the Finance Director.

B. Before the meeting he greeted the Company Secretary and Finance

Director.

C. Neither is correct.”

With the mix of above given sections, passages are given to read and then five questions need to be answered, they are same as comprehensions given in grammar books but definitely demands your maximum focus and briefing skills. This activity takes time to become a master.

You took a look upon a part of the tests, hopefully other parts including numerical and logical reasoning will be given to help your preparation in the coming days.