Does Psychometric Testing Fit Into Your Skills Assessment Program?

If you’re administering skills assessment tests and exams for your company or organization, you’re likely at least familiar with the concept of psychometric testing. These tests have existed in paper form and been used for a variety of purposes since the early 1900s and are developed by psychologists who specialize in psychometry. Psychometry is the scientific study of the theories and techniques related to testing an individual’s personality traits and cognitive abilities.

Today, these tests are implemented through a variety of assessments, measurements, and models, often via online platforms like Gauge. Increasingly, companies and organizations use psychometric testing in recruiting to get a better understanding of potential new hires and to assess an employee’s suitability for promotion.

Psychometric tests are most often used to assess and measure a candidate’s abilities and aptitudes for:

• • Performing and mastery of specific skills such as software, trades, machinery, and equipment
  • Managing all of the duties of a job, including technical and soft skills
  • Fitting into the organization as a whole as part of a team and collaborating with other individuals and teams
  • Getting along with others
  • Using verbal and written information and data to make decisions
  • Working under pressure, handling change, and managing conflict

Hiring and testing managers also use psychometric tests to

• • Identify and provide more information about a candidate
  • Use that data to compare candidates who are competing for positions
  • Pinpoint an individual’s core strengths and weaknesses
  • Reduce the various types of bias that might influence the hiring process
  • Meet the company’s diversity and inclusion goals

There are several psychometric testing types, with new tests being developed all the time. By understanding the method and purpose of these tests, you can decide which ones are most valuable to incorporate into your program and assess for traits that are critical to your hiring and workforce development efforts.

Skills Tests

These are a standard method of measuring a candidate’s current proficiency in technical or mechanical skills that are required to perform the functions of the job, and to assess their ability to learn new skills quickly and easily.

Aptitude Tests

These tests focus on specific abilities that a candidate needs to use to complete tasks and can include:

Diagrammatic Reasoning Tests

Use diagrams and charts to identify the ability to reason with logic.

Deductive Reasoning Tests

Use written information to assess the capacity for reaching a conclusion and making a decision.

Error Checking Tests

Use complex information such as code to determine the aptitude for identifying errors quickly and completely.

Numerical Reasoning Tests

Use narrative and statistical information (graphs, charts, and reports) to assess the capacity to interpret data, as well as to measure basic math skills.

Inductive Reasoning Tests

Use diagrams to inform the ability to recognize and explain patterns and trends.

Verbal Reasoning

Use written information to identify how you are able to make informed decisions.

Personality Tests

While not considered 100% accurate, personality tests can help paint a clear picture of a candidate’s personal characteristics and how well they might fit into the organization’s mission, vision, values, and culture. These characteristics are often compared against those of management and high-performing employees to determine if they are a suitable addition to the team. Personality tests are most often used to measure:

Behaviors

Evaluate a candidate’s likely behavior under specific theoretical circumstances.

Values

Determine if a candidate’s core values are in alignment with those of the company.

Attitude

Assess a candidate’s general attitudes when faced with new experiences, conflicts, challenges, and other people.

Motivation

Learn how the candidate is most easily motivated when it comes to decision-making, work ethic, and drive to succeed.

Your organization might be obligated to hire a trained psychometrist to develop proprietary tests, but it’s also possible to leverage the features in an online platform to create a skills assessment program that measures up to psychometric standards.

Gauge makes it easy to design exams that hone in on the kind of results you’re looking for using a dynamic and flexible set of question-building features. Crafting a question bank and setting it up to randomize delivery of a unique set of questions to each test-taker levels the playing ground and ensures security.

Gauge test result analysis provides both the high-level and granular data you need to keep your organization moving forward. Data reports provide a clear understanding of your employees abilities, inherent behaviors, and ways of interacting with others.

Use Gauge exam building and analytics to:

• • Determine test and question accuracy and fairness
  • Balance difficulty of randomized question delivery by tagging each question with its difficulty level (manually or automatically based on historical test data)
  • Optimize test passing rates and time limits with historical test data guidance
  • Test effectiveness of differing forms with A/B testing
  • Create test equity by eliminating bias

You’ll have instant access to automatically-generated reports that show you exam completion rates as well as comprehensive statistical data that shows you where your team excels and where they need improvement. You can easily adjust exams and questions right in the platform to optimize for your next testing session.

Gauge’s reporting function gives you quick access to:

• Built-in integrity analysis of exams and individual questions
• Exception reporting to see which users haven’t yet taken required tests or content
• Quick exporting in PDF, Excel, CSV, and Word formats
• Insights to craft future tests based on past results

Regardless if you’re using an online platform, or a hard-coded test designed by a hired psychometrician, psychometric tests are a great way to quickly learn a lot of useful information about your people in a fair, equitable way. This information will help you make timely and effective decisions about hiring, firing, and promotion that can help your organization thrive and grow.

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If your certification program is running on tools that were never built for it — and you’re starting to feel the friction in your daily operations — Gauge was designed for exactly this situation. It handles the full exam lifecycle for professional credentialing programs, from item banking through results and credential issuance, without requiring you to stitch together separate systems.