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.