how can psychometrics
help unlock potential?
The basics - what are psychometric tools?
Psychometric tools are questionnaires or tests that help organisations to
select the right people, facilitate individual and team development, and
increase organisational effectiveness. In the main, they fall into the following
categories:
• Personality: powerful methods of predicting how someone will typically
behave
• Ability: measure aptitudes such as how someone will perform when
solving problems or reasoning with verbal information; many measure
potential rather than current level of knowledge
• Career interests: help identify the types of work to which someone
would be suited
• 360-degree feedback: gather feedback on an individual’s performance
or personal attributes from a range of sources, from juniors to superiors
A psychometric tool should be:
• Objective: the results obtained from it are not influenced by the
administrator’s personal preferences or biases
• Standardised: it is administered and scored according to standard
procedures; people’s scores on the assessment are compared to known
benchmarks
• Reliable: it measures in a consistent way
• Valid: it measures the characteristics that it sets out to measure
• Sensitive: the test should show clear and meaningful differences
between individuals on the behaviour being assessed. It should not be
discriminatory, unfairly discriminating against any individual on the basis
of irrelevant characteristics
Why use psychometric tools?
Simply put, because they work. Individual tests are among the best predictors
of job performance and are even more powerful when combined with other
tests or interviews. They are proven to:
• Increase objectivity in staff selection and development
• Improve individual and interpersonal effectiveness
• Enhance teamwork and organisational performance
• Improve staff performance, morale and retention
When used effectively, they can increase the transparency, speed and quality
of line-management decisions about people, ensuring that best practices are
more readily transferred from HR processes into action.
And they are manifestly not just for use in recruitment. Leadership
development, teambuilding and organisational change are just three other
contexts where psychometric tools are proven to deliver results.
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