An important aspect of employee recruiting is psychometric testing – more employers are asking “What is it, and how do we reduce the risks of hiring the wrong person?” These questions usually have the same answer.

Any new hire is a potential risk for a business. You need to know if they’re going to be a hard worker, if they’re smart, and how well they adapt to particular types of jobs. Sometimes, due to increased demand, it’s a necessary risk, but it’s a risk nonetheless. Testing is there to find out the answers to questions like “Does this person get bored easily? How well does this person learn new skills or absorb data? Is this person introverted or extroverted?”

Reducing Uncertainties Through Testing

The questions that psychometric testing answers are ones that are critical to the success of an employee hire. The wrong employee can cost the business more than twice to seven times their salary in many circumstances. Psychometric tests may not be able to identify genius directly, but they’re a good benchmark for steering businesses away from problem employees before they’re hired.

Types of Psychometric Tests

The granddaddy of all psychometric tests is the Stanford-Binet standardized IQ test. It’s been the subject of rancorous debate ever since its introduction in the 1910s, before World War I. As a business application it’s not ideal, because it takes several hours to administer, and only measures one type of intelligence. Getting measurables in less than three hours of testing time is where commercial psychometric tests come in.

Getting the predictive capabilities of the Stanford Binet in less time is the real reason for the Wonderlic test. It’s got a scale from 1 to 50, and takes 30 minutes to administer. It’s widely used for any kind of paraprofessional recruitment, and is even used by the NFL to evaluate draft choices at the NFL combine.

What Makes These Tests Valuable?

From a staffing agency’s perspective, psychometric testing is a great way to tell what kinds of jobs to send a candidate to. A candidate who learns quickly, and is adroit at picking up new skills will be easier to place in technical jobs. A candidate with a high boredom threshold is easier to place in certain types of manufacturing jobs.

Other Types Of Tests

Psychometric testing can cover a wider range of personality traits and intelligence traits than just generalized intelligence and the ability to deal with abstractions. They can also be structured to measure social affinity and social intelligence – the ability to associate important details with faces and to adapt to different kinds of social pressure, determining introversion and extroversion profiles, and psychological stress responses (critical for the armed forces, fire-fighters and police work).

Another kind of test that gets used is the basic personality test; whether someone is an introvert or extrovert, whether they’re self driven or motivated by the approval of others. These personality inventories are useful for determining how a candidate will ‘fit in’ to a given team environment.