How psychometric testing can benefit recruitment

Recruitment is expensive. It takes time, too. As the world of work changes, bringing with it new challenges, it’s vital to keep ahead. If you don’t, it can be hard to find the right candidates. Psychometric testing is a reliable way to make sure you’re on the right recruitment track, not about to make a mistake that’ll be difficult and costly to fix.

So how, exactly, do psychometric tests evaluate a candidate’s suitability? It’s all about analysing a person’s psychological thinking via their attitude, personality and behaviour. No wonder so many employers harness these tests, using the results to measure people against the specific personality traits and skills the role requires. If you want a talented team player, it helps you find the right person. If you need someone to work independently without much supervision, testing helps winkle out the perfect employee.

Why can’t you just ask the right questions? You can, of course, and you will during the interview part of the recruitment process. But not everyone has the level of self-awareness needed to know what their working personality type is. They’ll have had plenty of time to practice their answers beforehand. Some people find interviews stressful, so might not perform their best when in fact they’re the ideal candidate. And an interview, being time-limited, rarely gives you enough time or opportunity to get to know someone well enough to make wise judgements.

With the best will in the world, the interviewer might have biases they’re genuinely not aware of. Psychometric tests always deliver reliable results, an excellent tool for decoding a potential employee’s personality and working style without bias.

Using psychometric tests helps companies improve their staff retention rate and cut churn, simply because you take on the right people from the start. You have so much more control over who you take on, able to employ people whose ethos dovetails with the company’s values, brand and identity. It also helps you focus away from how likeable you find a candidate. Just because you like them – or not – it doesn’t mean they’re either perfect or unsuitable for the job.

Psychometric testing delves deeper into a person’s way of thinking than you can as an interviewer, which means you choose people who really do match the role. Then there’s data. While it’s wonderful having lots of it, it takes time to analyse and draw conclusions. The results from a psychometric test are analysed and ranked for you, making it easy to compare candidates in a fair, intelligent way.  Because you don’t have to struggle to analyse batches of CVs, interview notes and application forms, the whole process is faster, saving the business time as well as money.

Psychometric tests let you quickly filter out the candidates who are patently unsuitable, not as fully invested in the role as you’d like, or the opposite – ideal in every way. And because it’s possible to tailor these tests to suit your business needs, they’re always highly relevant. You can harness this kind of testing at any stage in the recruitment process, in different ways with different intentions. The interview stage is an obvious place, but how about also using psychometric testing at the end of the process, just to check you really have picked the right person?

Finally, you can even use this kind of testing to check the people you already employ are in the right roles, doing jobs they enjoy, thrive on, and are best at. If not, you can change people’s working lives – and your bottom line – for the better.