Psychometric and ability testing

The use of psychometrics in the hiring process as part of a holistic assessment battery offers several valuable benefits for both employers and candidates. At People Business, we support numerous clients with their assessment needs as part of a recruitment process or leadership development programmes.

Whether your organisation is looking to demonstrate objective assessment, improve the quality of hire, increase efficiency or improve team dynamics by closing gaps in aptitude or personality, psychometric assessment can help you to find the right people for your business. And, once your teams are formed, working with personality profiles and aptitude assessments can help a team to think more deeply about how they work together effectively.

Key advantages of using psychometric and ability testing

1. Ensures you are objective when assessing candidates, and mitigates unconscious biases

Psychometric tests provide a standardised and objective way to assess candidates, reducing biases that may occur in traditional interview processes, leading to more diverse and inclusive hiring outcomes. This ensures a fair evaluation based on measurable criteria.

2. Helps you to find the right people, with greater efficiency

By providing clear insights into candidates’ strengths and weaknesses, psychometric tests streamline the hiring process. They help identify candidates who are most likely to succeed in a given role based on their cognitive abilities, personality traits, and skills. Employers can quickly identify the most suitable candidates who fit the job requirements and the company culture, leading to higher job satisfaction and lower turnover rates whilst reducing the time and resources spent on extensive interview rounds.

3. Assists the individual with developing their self-awareness

Candidates who undergo psychometric testing often gain insights into their own abilities, personality traits, and areas for development. This can help them understand their fit for the role and the organisation better. For those already in role, the data from psychometric tests can inform the development and training needs of employees, helping to create personalised development plans that enhance individual and team performance.

4. Demonstrates your organisation’s desire to conduct fair, consistent and impartial processes

When used properly, psychometric tests can add to the legal defensibility of hiring decisions. They provide a documented, standardised method of evaluating candidates, which can be valuable if hiring decisions are ever questioned or challenged. It also ensures that larger companies have a consistent approach to hiring and developing people.

Why us?

Specifically focusing on attraction, one of the things that differentiates us is our insistence that anyone completing a psychometric profile should have a debrief with us.

By design, psychometrics are hard to ‘kid’, people can practise. The other consideration is that personality profiles in particular are very good at identifying our trends, but might not show up where we have coping mechanisms or mitigation strategies.

When working with our clients, we therefore insist that we conduct a one-hour interview with candidates to question the themes that we identify in our assessment. We then feed back to our clients using not only the assessment report, but our gleanings and suggestions on what they might like to probe in further interview stages.

We have extensive experience in many tools, including all the main Five-Factor personality assessments:

• 16PF
• OPQ
• Wave
• Hogan
• ESCI
• PAPI
• FIRO-B
• MBTI
• Insights
• DiSC

We’ve also developed our own proprietary psychometric, called Good Boss Questionnaire (GBQ), which specifically looks at first line management and the impact of management style on organisational effectiveness. You can find out more about GBQ here.

If you think we can help you, or if you have any questions, please do get in touch.