How Reliable Are Psychometric Tests For Finding The Best Candidates? | Hiring someone for any particular position is no easy feat. It’s easy to think recruitment is all about sitting behind a desk, interviewing candidates one after another. While it’s not exactly wrong, recruitment is a process, and a strenuous one at that.
Any recruiter would tell you that they wish recruitment is as easy as talking to someone. Conversations are known to be therapeutic, so who doesn’t want that cathartic luxury while earning money, right?
Well, interviews are one thing, but there’s also reviewing each curriculum vitae, pre-employment assessment, informing shortlisted candidates, job-offer signing, onboarding, orientation, training, and the list goes on. In addition, each step of the recruitment process is just a harder version of the previous one. Likewise, breaking the bad news to someone is not as easy as other people make it out to be.
Thus, it’s vital to make the selection process stringent. Candidates are giving their best, and so does the recruitment team. Throughout decades, though, recruiters have seen a divide in the use of psychometric tests when it comes to hiring someone.
So, how reliable are psychometric tests for finding the best candidates?
The Whats And The Whys
Many people become immediately apprehensive (and low-key scared) when answering tests, especially psychometric tests. The reason for this is that it’s somehow weird to know there’s a way to quantify the human psyche. Or that there’s going to be wrong answers when it comes to these kinds of tests. However, in most psychometric tests, there are no wrong answers.
Psychometric scales are ways to understand whether or not there’s a commonality across human behavior and if there would be any sound inference given this commonality.
They go beyond wild assumptions or guesses that often lead to weak claims. Remember, science is about these claims, and without having a solid way to back them up and prove them, they’re nothing but empty statements. Besides, because Psychology is a science, psychometric tests (and tests in general) contribute to the veracity of this discipline.
This way, recruiters and applicants alike can be confident that utilizing psychometric tests in the hiring process is backed by science. Psychometric tests are also one of the few ways to project how well the candidate will perform upon being hired. In the meantime, check out this post to increase the likelihood of acing your application.
Depending on the test, most of the factors that any scale measures can be used mathematically to understand the learning curve and the overall aptitude of the candidate.
Candidates who score high in IQ tests may be expected to perform well than others who have relatively lower IQ scores. Intelligence isn’t the only factor at play in various tasks, though. Because psychometric tests can measure personality types as well, recruiters can leverage them in making their decisions.
Moreover, psychometric tests, especially standardized ones, have good psychometric qualities. This refers to the test’s reliability and validity. Reliability is the consistency of the test scores in different test conditions, while validity is the accuracy of the test in measuring what it claims to measure.
As a recruiter, you’d want to make use of psychometric tests that have high reliability and validity scores. This is because candidates are different from one another; they come from a diverse demographic after all. Because of this, you want to be confident that no one’s wasting their time in answering the tests.
You don’t want to waste your candidate’s time answering a personality test, only to find out after that it cannot accurately measure what it’s supposed to measure. The same could be said when it comes to applicants. It’s only fair to be given tests that can do what it claims to do, especially when it affects their chance of being hired.
The Final Verdict
In conclusion, psychometric tests are a reliable and good way to select the best talents, but this depends on the tests used by the recruiters. If the tests have bad psychometric qualities, the reliability of the tests goes down the drain.
Additionally, the reliability of psychometric tests in recruitment must only be used as an aid and not as the only way to gauge candidates. Fortunately, the hiring process is stringent, which already mitigates the mistake of solely relying on tests.
Furthermore, any good and experienced recruiter would know that psychometric tests are, in no way, decisive in understanding the growth of any candidate. They can help, but the human psyche and the unpredictability of events are two things that could never be quantified by any test.
