You work hard to identify a relevant candidate from hundreds and convince him to look for a change; recommend him to your client for a detailed interview and he comes out in flying colors; and finally, Managing Director of the company meets and approves him for an offer. However, the result of a psychometric test, that he takes later, projects him to be a mismatch for the job under consideration and all your efforts go waste.
Yes, the 'you' that I mentioned above, is 'me.' It has happened with me, recently, and not once but a few times. I don't know, if my strained relationship with HR director of the company - may be because the MD of the company doesn't hesitate to call me whenever there is a critical position to be filled up on priority - has a decisive influence in deflecting the outcome but, something was wrong!
Well, there seems to be a major concern in intellectual circle over the relevance of psychometric tests in decision making as far as recruitment is concerned, as evident from the following analysis:
"It is important to understand that testing on its own should never be the soleAlso, the comments by participants in a linkedin discussion reveal how concerned but divided, professionals are, over the usefulness of psychometric tests in recruitment.
tool in selection decisions. There is any amount of research material and
validation studies that provide information on the predictive validity of various
means of selecting staff. Recent findings provide quite an optimistic picture of the value of the interview and rigorous reference checking as a highly valid method of selection." Click here to download and read this interesting analysis.
Digging further, I recently conducted a survey to find out what our HR folks think about its usefulness and surprisingly 90% of them ruled out its importance in final decision making, specifying clearly, that it may only be used as an additional tool to gain some foresight into candidates' personality -- nothing more!
All of them clearly opined that psychometric test, is, no doubt, an important predictive tool, but a wrong use may even put the organization in jeopardy in terms of picking up a basket-full of non-performers over a period of time.
So, personality test may be misused as a lethal weapon to destroy good recruitment and also the organization, if, there's some one committed to...
What do you say?
Do you think psychometric test as a decisive tool in recruitment is contextually valid, or an obscure manifestation of inflated intellectualism promoted by people with vested interests -- purely for business ( or individual ) gains?
Update: 20th Oct 2010
1. According to Businessballs: In most respects psychometrics tests and personality models are aids to personal development and to helping people understand more about themselves. They are not to be used a single basis for recruitment or career decisions.
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