Advantages and Disadvantages of Psychometric Tests
Employers desire to find out the maximum information about candidates. Psychometric tests are one type of pre-employment tests, which help reveal much about candidates for jobs.
What Is Psychometric Testing?
It is mostly featuring self-report questionnaires. These pose questions about attitudes, behaviours, motives, preferences, and values. Some psychometric tests also reveal abilities like tests of numerical, verbal or graphical problems.
Many employers use psychometric testing as part of selection process because poor choices in recruitment have a huge impact on the company. However, psychometric tests like Psychometric Test are associated with following benefits and risks:
Advantages:
- Attracting right candidates
Even prior to advertising for job opportunities, psychometric principles help to guide the process of hiring. Before advertising, HR managers define what personality of candidates they want. This will help in attracting the right candidates.
- Understand candidates
Psychometric tests aid employers to understand the personal work style, motivations, and abilities of candidates. This helps them select the right candidate for the job.
Such tests expose how candidates perform in a job, how they relate to customers, how they deal with customers and how they will fit into the culture of the company.
- Design training programs
Psychometric tests reveal what motivates candidates and how they like to learn. Using this, you can design your training and incentive schemes for getting the best out of new hires.
- Quantify test results
The predictive validity of psychometric tests is the main point in anticipating potential performance in a job. Using questionnaires in recruitment and promotion helps identify who fits the role perfectly. For example, candidates who perform well in a reasoning test are likely to analyse issues and situations better.
- Reduces cognitive biases
When recruitment is restricted only to interview, there is a high chance for poor hiring. Interviews need to be supported by some objective factors about the candidate. Otherwise, results of assessment may be damaged by cognitive biases (prejudices and stereotypes) of assessors.
Standardized tools of measurement use a statistical approach and enable comparison of candidates based on a common calibration.
- Simple training
To assess results of modern, psychometric tests, HR managers can be trained in the simple process of evaluation. Nowadays, most test developers provide tools of assessment, which have been designed for use in the workplace and are both simple as well as adhere to scientific validation. Evaluation results are easily available online offering pleasant analysis methods such as graphs.
Disadvantages:
Psychometric tests are however beset with following limitations:
- Over interpretation of test results
There is a risk that employers may be excessively interpreting test results. Because of this danger, the companies must use the relevant expertise of provider of tests for proper analysis.
- Cannot be used on its own
The companies must take care not to hire someone, based only on performance in psychometric tests. Such tests are only additional criteria to base a decision for hiring. Use internal benchmarks of the performance of best employees to compare prowess of new hires.
- Issue of cost
Automated tests can be used well for early screening of candidates, but many psychometric tests require the help of professionals in their administration and interpretations, which might work out expensive.
No doubt, there are some disadvantages of using these tests, yet one cannot overlook the benefits these psychometric tests offer that even these Fortune 500 companies have included them in their recruiting strategies.
