What is a Psychometric Assessment?

Resumes might not always be enough to showcase the true potential of shortlisted candidates. It is true that the qualifications and technical skills of candidates are essential considerations. However, their cognitive skills, behavioral preferences, and personality traits are equally crucial for ensuring long-term employment success.

Therefore, incorporating psychometric assessment for hiring can be an adequate measure of a candidate’s overall suitability for your company. Such tests consist of various quizzes or tests that will challenge a candidate to showcase their intelligence beyond their technical proficiencies. 

In this article, you will learn about what a psychometric assessment is and how it can help you in hiring the top talent for your organization. 

Understanding Psychometric Assessments

A psychometric assessment is composed of two different types of tests:

• Cognitive Assessments: Such tests assess a candidate’s cognitive capability, like logical reasoning, problem-solving, verbal reasoning, numerical reasoning, deductive reasoning and reading comprehension skills.
• Personality Assessments: These assessments are curated to determine the personality traits of a candidate, including their motivations, behavioral styles, communication proficiency, culture fit and leadership potential. 

Earlier, hiring teams were meant to stick to just a conventional assessment, which involved skill-based tests and interviews for determining if a candidate fits well with the job requirements. 

However, the skill assessments aren’t adequate enough to determine all the attributes essential for a candidate to fit into the company culture. Beyond that, such tests also lack the potential to assess the personality traits of a candidate. 

Therefore, psychometric assessments become more than important for your hiring team!  It helps you gauge the behavioral styles, cognitive skills, emotional intelligence, aptitude, and personality traits of a candidate, with in-depth evaluation parameters. It can be an essential tool for your recruitment team to make efficient hiring decisions, backed by relevant data. 

When implementing psychometric tests in your usual hiring process, you must know that it doesn’t just help with recruitment ease, but also fosters employee development. With a clear & concise understanding of employees’ strengths and weaknesses, you can tailor dedicated training programs and optimize their overall performance. In the end, psychometric assessments can prove effective to ensure long-term productivity for your organization. 

Reasons Why You Should Consider a Psychometric Assessment for Hiring

To help you feel more convinced about levelling up your recruitment process, here are a few reasons why you should consider implementing psychometric assessment:

1. Gain Better Insights into a Candidate’s Profile for the Role

Screening the resumes might help you figure out if a candidate holds the necessary qualifications, experience, and technical skills. However, adding a psychometric assessment at the right stage of your hiring process will help you evaluate a candidate’s:

• Adaptability
• Resilience
• Leadership potential
• Analytical thinking
• Problem-solving skills
• Conflict resolution abilities
• Communication proficiency
• Teamwork

This way, your hiring manager will be more confident in matching the right candidates to their respective roles, eventually reducing the number of hire-and-fire situations within the organization. 

2. Complement the Existing Recruitment Methods

Psychometric assessments being used for hiring can be positioned perfectly well alongside your existing recruitment methods. In short, you can attain a balanced hiring process by combining a psychometric test with skills-based assessments and multiple interview rounds. 

No assessment alone is sufficient to gauge a candidate entirely! Therefore, leveraging each of the methods will help streamline the overall decision-making process. 

3. Job Performance Prediction

There have been several studies on how psychometric tests can help you predict the future job performance of a candidate. That’s possible because these assessments are curated to test the personality, emotional intelligence, and cognitive skills of candidates, which directly implies their performance quotient in the long run. 

Based on the results, your recruiters will be able to identify applicants with ideal qualities required for excelling in specific job roles. Such predictive abilities of a psychometric assessment help reduce the hiring mismatch situation for your company. Not just that, but the potential turnover rate will also be reduced! 

4. Foster a Positive Candidate Experience

By conducting psychometric tests, you will be providing candidates with a detailed report on their personality, motivations, skills, and behaviors. Irrespective of the hiring decision, this assessment will help candidates learn more about their strengths or weaknesses, associated with being a culture fit, a leader, or a team player. 

With a customized psychometric assessment report, candidates can improve and position themselves efficiently in the job market. Thus, you secure a positive candidate experience in your hiring process. With that, you are not just establishing a good rapport, but are also boosting the brand’s reputation. 

Different Types of Psychometric Tests that You Can Implement

Here are some of the different types of psychometric tests that you can consider incorporating into your hiring process for recruiting top talent:

1. DISC Assessment

The DISC test is meant to evaluate a candidate’s proficiency in four critical personality types: Dominance (D), Influence (I), Steadiness (S), and Conscientiousness (C). Such an assessment will evaluate a candidate’s:

• Assertiveness

It is the quality that highlights the confidence in a candidate, followed by astounding communication, and the ability to contribute effectively in a team. 

• Influencing Ability

It is the personality trait that showcases a candidate’s ability to motivate or persuade team members towards achieving a common goal. 

• Optimistic Nature

This trait indicates that an applicant brings a positive attitude towards every task, irrespective of the complexity. 

• Ability to Cooperate

With a proficient ability to cooperate, a candidate is proven to be a good team player and to drive better work efficiency. 

• Objective Reasoning

Candidates with objective reasoning skills will be able to make more logical and impactful decisions at work, keeping aside personal emotions or opinions.

The DISC test is a popular psychometric assessment meant to determine if a person can align with your current team dynamics and workplace culture. 

2. 16 Personality Assessment

It is yet another stand-out psychometric assessment that can help you filter out the best candidates from a pool of applications in no time! As the name suggests, this test will categorize applicants into 16 different types of personalities, which will be a combination of different traits. 

With the 16 Personality Assessment, you will be able to evaluate if a candidate is more of an:

• Introvert or Extravert

It will specify if a candidate likes to work collaboratively while fostering better people interactions or independently. 

• Intuition or Sensing Type

This trait determines the ability of applicants to process the information provided to them. Sensing types are more detail-oriented, whereas the intuitive types often think of the long-term possibilities. 

• Judging or Perceiving Type

It indicates the approach candidates take in their lives! Judgers are people who like to be structured and organized, whereas perceivers are often quick to grasp the open options. 

• Thinking or Feeling Type

The thinkers are candidates who prefer approaching any work with proper analysis of data or facts, whereas the feeling types often prioritize empathy and think about how their decisions will affect others. 

The result of this test will give you a clear picture of what your candidates are capable of beyond their technical skills. For long, productive employment, it is important that your applicants align with the work culture and team dynamics of your organization. Thus, the 16 Personality Psychometric Assessment can be of great help!

3. Cognitive Tests

As part of the psychometric assessment of a candidate, cognitive tests are very crucial! The purpose of this test is to evaluate the critical thinking, decision-making, and problem-solving abilities of an applicant. Using it in your hiring process will ensure that every employee you onboard has the cognitive prowess for the respective positions. 

This test will evaluate the candidates on skills such as:

• Logical reasoning

This skill highlights a candidate’s ability to analyze the given data or information and make impactful workplace decisions using it. 

• Problem-solving

Having problem-solving skills demonstrates that a candidate is capable of handling complex challenges with critical thinking.  

• Verbal reasoning

It is the skill that showcases a person’s ability to understand and interpret written information, essential for making workplace decisions. 

• Numerical reasoning

Data interpretation in decision-making at a workplace becomes a very essential skill, and the numerical reasoning trait helps determine that in a candidate. 

• Deductive reasoning

It expresses the ability of a candidate to make logical conclusions by identifying data or information patterns. 

• Reading comprehension

Good reading comprehension in a candidate will indicate he/she can follow instructions, prepare presentations, or communicate effectively with clients.

Using this particular psychometric assessment will help you identify the top performer from the crowd of applicants, which will eventually boost your hiring accuracy. 

Ideal Way to Integrate Psychometric Assessment into Your Recruitment Process

In order to reap the benefits of psychometric assessment for hiring top talent, you ought to integrate or position it at the appropriate stage of your recruitment process. Here are some things for you to consider regarding the same:

1. Implement it at the Right Screening Stage

You can integrate psychometric assessment into the initial screening stages of your candidate hiring process. This way, you can filter out the applicants based on their overall suitability for the job role. Thus, it will ensure that your recruitment team will be investing time & effort only in the candidates who can thrive within your organization. 

2. Use this Assessment as a Supplement, Not a Replacement

Psychometric tests shouldn’t replace any of your existing candidate screening or traditional hiring methods. It should complement the current process and help you attain a better understanding of whether a candidate is fit for your work culture. You can evaluate the psychometric traits alongside other assessments to make the final decision. 

3. Psychometric Evaluation Shouldn’t be the Sole Assessment Factor

Alongside the personality, behavior, and emotional intelligence traits derived from the psychometric assessment, you should equally emphasize a candidate’s technical skills, experience, education, and other attributes for quality hiring. 

How Can Ducknowl Help You Implement Psychometric Assessment for Hiring?

At Ducknowl, we believe that psychometric assessments are effective instruments to determine the core values, behavioural styles, emotional intelligence, cognitive abilities, and personality traits of a candidate. Having this insight into an applicant’s profile can be a decision-maker for your recruitment team. 

In pursuit of embracing this idea and prioritizing quality hiring for your organization, Ducknowl introduces its diverse psychometric tests, categorized into different types. We have DISC, 16 Personality, Motivation, Cognitive, and other such assessments available for you to swiftly integrate into your traditional recruitment process. 

Finding the top talent in this competitive job market is difficult, but to ensure the best ones join you, you ought to implement the right psychometric assessments. Get a demo today, or reach out to us for more information. 

Conclusion

As part of modern-day hiring practices, psychometric tests are very crucial tools that can scale your recruitment efficiency by great numbers. Not just that, but it also improves the overall employee performance and organizational productivity! 

Such tests can give you a clear overview of a candidate’s true potential, beyond what the resume has to say! Your recruiters will be able to make informed hiring decisions, giving you the chance to build a productive workforce and drive predictable success for your organization. 

To learn more about how psychometric assessments can improve your hiring, get in touch with our team at Ducknowl.