If you’re not already using psychometric testing in your selection and recruitment strategies, be prepared for this article to convince you of one thing: you definitely need to in 2023!
With an unstable economy and an increasingly competitive job market, attracting and hiring the right candidates for the right roles is going to be more of a priority than ever for businesses around the world in 2023 - and psychometric testing is one way you can make your recruitment strategy do the heavy lifting for you, so you can focus on growing your business rather than worrying about how to make good recruitment decisions.
So, without further ado, here are 4 reasons why you need to add psychometric testing into your recruitment strategy for 2023 and beyond…
It’s not enough to be qualified for a job. Sure, you might find someone with 15+ years’ experience in everything they could possibly need for the role and a-hundred-and-one qualifications to prove it - but what if they don’t fit culturally?
We’re by no means saying that everyone you hire should fit in perfectly well with all your existing team members - but there are some elements of organisational culture that will make a difference to whether a new hire is successful in a role.
If your organisational culture is young and collaborative and your team members have a non-negotiable trip to the local bar every Friday night, someone who is more introverted or values peace and quiet and solo working over collaboration might not be the best fit.
And similarly, if your organisational culture is prim-and-proper and everything is done by the book at every turn, someone who values creativity, flexibility and free-thinking might not be the best fit.
By using personality-based psychometric tests, you can get an insight into who your candidate really is - not just what they’re able to do. And having that deeper understanding of them can prevent you from hiring someone who looks great on paper, but hates the culture within a week of joining the team. For your sake and for your candidates’ sake, having the ability to assess cultural fit with psychometric testing is hugely valuable - and definitely something that should be added to your 2023 recruitment strategy.
There are hundreds of studies out there showing how much unconscious bias plays a role in recruitment. And in the age where discrimination of any kind has no place in the recruitment process, it’s vital that your recruitment strategy adopts methods and practices that reduce the impact of unconscious bias as much as humanly possible.
And one way to do that is to introduce psychometric testing.
Instead of relying on unstructured, person-to-person interviews that are hugely subjective and result in teams of people who get on with the interviewer rather than actually being right for the role, your 2023 recruitment strategy can use reliable and well-validated psychometric testing instead.
By adding in an element of objectivity into the recruitment process, the risk of your HR team’s unconscious biases slowly but surely creating a team of look-a-likes is significantly reduced. You’ll be able to assess someone’s competence (through aptitude tests) and soft skills (through personality tests) objectively, rather than relying on ‘gut feeling’ or allowing any prejudice (against race, accent, or even what someone wears to an interview) to creep into the decision making process.
You may never be able to entirely eliminate unconscious bias (because we’re humans, after all) but psychometric testing will help.
Hiring an unqualified person for a role is expensive. Not just in terms of money, but in terms of resources too.
When your recruitment process only looks at someone’s CV and their performance at interview, it’s very difficult to accurately predict future performance.
Sure, their CV might look great - but it also might be inflated, full of tiny white lies, or outright inaccurate.
And the same goes for their performance at interview. It’s natural for anyone in an interview scenario to emphasise their strengths and gloss over their weaknesses, so how do you know what they’re really going to be like in the role?
That’s where psychometric testing comes in. Because psychometric tests give you a reliable and objective measure of someone’s competence (in aptitude tests) and their personality traits (in personality tests).
And if you’re already thinking, “but surely someone can fake a personality test as easily as they can fake an interview” - you’re (respectfully) wrong! We’ve written before about the reliability and validity of psychometric tests and we’re happy to report that they really are reliable! Sure, they’re not completely infallible - but they’re much more reliable and give you much more objective data to base a hiring decision on than an interview-based recruitment process.
Finally, we get to the big motivator: money (and resources).
Hiring the wrong person for the job costs a LOT of money. We all know that. Oxford Economics and Unum estimate that hiring the wrong person on a £25k (almost €29k) salary costs a business over £30k (almost €35k).
But introducing psychometric testing into the recruitment process doesn’t just make sure you’re not stung by the cost of a bad hire; it actually helps to reduce the cost of hiring in the first place.
By streamlining the recruitment process and introducing psychometric assessments, your recruitment team save time and resources that would otherwise be used on screening hundreds (or thousands) of applicants.
Psychometric testing is usually conducted online and can be largely automated, reducing the time needed for your HR team to read through applications and make snap decisions about who to take forward to the next stage. A lot of the filtering process can be automated, which gives your HR team more time and resources to spend on thoroughly interviewing (in a structured, unbiased way) candidates who perform well at the psychometric testing stage.
Hurray! Introducing psychometric testing into your recruitment process is definitely not something you’ll regret doing. Even if you have no idea what psychometrics to use, how to use them, or how to streamline your recruitment process to find the creme de la creme of candidates - we’re here to help!
Whether it’s training your HR teams to administer and interpret psychometric tests in-house or partnering with you to conduct psychometric testing on your behalf, we’ve been doing this for years and we know exactly how to help you get the most out of psychometric testing.
Get in touch to get started!
