To assess candidates applying for jobs or being sourced for a vacancy in your company, you’ll need different types of tests.
Some of those tests will evaluate their technical skills, such as coding, design skills, specific knowledge of certain technologies, or even other areas like writing, translation and marketing. Then there are tests that will explore candidates’ cognitive skills.
Tests used to assess cognitive and other soft skills are called psychometric tests.
Also known as personality tests, cognitive behavior tests, and psychometric profiling, these tests assess different skills and abilities.
And there are dozens of these tests. Some are paid and some are free. Some are generic, as in they explore different candidate traits, while others are specific.
What all these tests have in common is the final report you get, assessing the candidate’s potential and unique abilities.
In this article, we’ll be looking at the 6 most common types of psychometric tests and how they help hiring managers and recruiters.
As a company looking to hire one or more candidates, you may wonder if you need a psychometric test. These types of tests help you evaluate a candidate’s
Personality tests also offer
Since psychometric tests assess different factors, they offer insights into personality traits, which you can’t evaluate in an online interview.
For example, it’s easy for employees to list adaptability in their resumes or say they easily adapt to changing work environments or systems. But those are only words.
A psychometric test can help you assess this type of soft skills along with others.
Personality tests can also help you determine if a potential candidate fits your work culture.
For example, if the role you’re trying to fill requires fast-paced performance and consistent collaboration, you need someone who is an extrovert. Or at least measures low in the introvert trait.
Psychometric tests aren’t just helpful for employers. They help candidates and employees learn more about themselves and improve in aspects that may be hindering them.
By taking personality tests, candidates can learn about their strengths and weaknesses and use them to apply to roles that fit their personality.
For example, many people consider working in sales because the greater their results, the higher their commissions. However, not all people are meant to be salespeople.
Many falter a few months after joining a sales role because of the pressure and fast-paced nature of the job.
You can give personality tests to your current employees to learn more about their hidden skill sets. You may have someone who is not in a customer-facing role but has the potential to be a great account manager.
Based on the above, we can determine several use cases or situations where psychometric testing and assessments can help hiring managers and recruiters.
Consider using psychometric profiling when you want to
Before diving into the most common types of psychometric assessments, there’s something we need to clarify.
A frequently-asked question about personality tests is if they are the same as IQ tests.
The fact is, IQ tests aren’t the same as psychometric tests. An IQ measures a person’s intelligence, by looking at their “thinking style and strengths and weaknesses in different types of thinking.”
On the other hand, psychometric assessments explore personality traits, behaviors, aptitude, and emotional intelligence.
Now, let’s look at the different types of psychometric and personality tests and what each can be used for.
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® (MBTI®) personality test is one of the leading types of psychometric tests.
Taking the form of a questionnaire, the MBTI test sorts people into one of 16 personality types.
It looks at personality through different dimensions, namely
Once the candidate or employee takes the MBTI test, they’ll get a 4-letter result, indicating their personality type. With this knowledge, people can understand themselves better as well as their interactions with others.
The MBTI personality test is not a free test. But it’s one of the oldest and most powerful psychometric tests.
Next up is the Big 5 Personality test, or more commonly referred to as the Big 5 test. It defines personality traits based on 5 broad dimensions or factors. These 5 traits are:
The Big 5 test comprises a questionnaire of 60 questions and usually takes between 5 and 10 minutes to complete.
The Enneagram is a type of psychometric test that looks into people’s motivations, desires, and fears. The results indicate nine personality types. It “maps each of these types on a nine-pointed diagram, which helps to illustrate how the types relate to one another.” (Truity)
The 9 personalities are: the perfectionist, the giver, the achiever, the individualist, the investigator, the skeptic, the enthusiast, the challenger, and the peacemaker.
Another common type of psychometric test is the DISC test. It stands for Drive, Influence, Support, and Clarity.
In terms of test results, “DISC results show where a person falls along two axes of behavior: Active vs. Receptive and Skeptical vs. Agreeable. Taken together, these two axes form a grid, where each quadrant represents one of the four DISC personality types.” (Truity)
Situational judgment tests (SJTs) evaluate a person’s ability to think and make decisions in difficult or spur-of-the-moment type of situations.
It’s not just about how people think but how they think when caught unawares, in specific situations or under pressure.
In an SJT, the candidate or individual is given a scenario and asked to choose the best and worst course of action.
SJTs can be helpful when hiring candidates for roles that involve work pressure or regular uncommon situations. They can also be useful customer-facing and managerial roles.
The SMART personality test looks at people’s characters as 5-dimensional. It’s based on the Big 5 theory and is often seen as an extension of it.
SMART stands for Sociability, Agreeableness, Mindfulness, Receptivity to new things, and Temperamental behaviors.
The SMART personality test can be used for a wide range of roles and industries. From finance to marketing to education to tech-based roles. From academic roles to account manager and customer service roles, to managerial-level roles such as marketing or HR managers, product managers,…etc.
The SMART test comprises 60 questions, which usually require 15 minutes to complete.
You don’t need to conduct a psychometric test for every role. However, these types of tests offer a different perspective of an applicant as opposed to technical or role-specific tests.
They’re also an opportunity to build employee retention by finding hidden skills amongst your team members and promoting members internally.
At TechieMatter, we help companies find and hire top tech talents and provide them with psychometric testing to enhance their recruitment process.
Companies can use the psychometric assessment features to measure cognitive skills in other, non-technical, team members.
Try psychometric testing with TechieMatter and uncover hidden gems in applicant pools and amidst your team.