Psychometric Tests - Information and Guidelines

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Best practice in psychometric testing requires the use of a combination of cognitive and personality tests to accurately predict role suitability.

Aptitude or Cognitive Psychometric Tests

These tests are typically timed and inform you on candidates’ fluid and crystallised intelligence which are important predictors of people’s ability to think strategically, grasp the ‘bigger picture’, quickly integrate new information, solve problems, effectively communicate information, produce effective reports, as well as use verbal and numerical information to make informed business decisions.

Psych Press offers customised batteries of psychometric tests to target specific areas of cognitive ability. Tests are drawn from six main cognitive aptitude types including:

• Abstract Reasoning – measures the individual’s problem solving skills, ability to quickly learn new information, ability to think strategically.
• Verbal Reasoning – measures the individual’s written communication skills, analytical abilities, ability to quickly identify critical issues from written material such as company reports and marketing documents.
• Numerical Reasoning – measures the individual’s ability to use numerical data as a tool to make decisions and ability to quickly identify critical issues from numerical data (graphs and tables).
• Emotional Reasoning – measures the extent to which individuals are able to identify what emotions others are feeling in a given situation and to predict their future emotional responses. It is a key competency in ‘connecting with people’ and building rapport and good working relationships.
• Spatial Reasoning – measures the individual’s ability to correctly identify proportions of objects, to visually reorient objects in order to fit them together in a certain physical space and the ability to identify changes in the physical environment (which may result in work safety incidents). Competencies relevant to this measure include layout and space utilisation, flexibility, identification and solving of work safety issues.
• Mechanical reasoning - measures candidates’ ability to perceive and understand the kinetic role of visual objects. These motion-and-effect tasks are indicative of the techniques used in everyday performance of realistic problem solving tasks. This test takes a diagrammatical form and requires candidates to understand the subsequent effects of the configuration of certain elements.

Personality/Behavioural Style Psychometric Tests

Work-related personality tests are untimed and are designed to measure and inform you of candidates’ behavioural tendencies and preferences within the occupational context. Some of the more common work-related behavioural style and competencies which can be measured using personality tests are:

• team work
• influencing style
• leadership
• decision making style
• coping with stress
• achievement focus
• innovative thinking
• compliance with rules and regulations
• ability to drive change and implement improvements

To learn more about how to select psychometric tests and our offerings, please click here.