People often face difficulties in understanding the perfect & suitable jobs or even fail to understand their own personalities. There are many methods to understand your strength & weaknesses, and psychometric tests are one of the verified methods to understand your personality traits.
What are psychometric tests?
In a very simple definition, psychometric tests are assessment tools used to measure the personality traits, aptitude, intellectual abilities, behavioural patterns, etc, of an individual. Psychometric tests are mostly used or preferred while pursuing a professional course or while joining full-time job opportunities. There are 2 different types of psychometric tests.
- Personality Tests
- Aptitude Tests
Why psychometric personality tests?
As mentioned earlier, psychometric personality tests are used to understand the candidate’s nature and abilities. These tests help employers to decide whether the candidate is suitable for the requirements of the job and compatible with the company’s vision.
Why personality psychometric tests are important for recruiters?
The professional jobs market is highly competitive and that creates difficulty for recruiters to hire required and compatible employees. Any candidate who looks suitable with skills might not be a safe bet for the company. Psychometric testing allows recruiters to assess the traits & skills of a candidate, objectively. Any experienced recruiter can find the confidence ability of a candidate but still, they need a process that can take the selection process to the next level. Here are the different types of methodologies any recruiter uses to assess the candidate that helps them to make the selection procedure to the next level.
Methodologies of psychometric personality testing:
- Subjective Methods
- Objective Methods
- Projective Methods
- Psycho- analytical Methods
- Physical Test Methods or Physiological Methods
Let’s talk about these methodologies one by one.
Subjective Methods:
Subjective Methods are those in which a candidate is asked to talk about subjective options like traits, personal experiences, aims & needs. Subjective methods have subtypes such as the autobiography, the case history, the interview and the questionnaire or inventory.
Objective Methods:
Objective Methods are the results announced by the examiners, and judges after giving some similar life experiences to the candidate. Some of the objective methods are miniature life situations, unobserved situations, physiological measures and rating scales.
Projective Methods:
As the name suggests, in the projective type of method the candidate is asked to project thoughts, throw imagination, wishes, and other reactions freely by making up a story, by interpreting bots. Projective methods are used to reveal a candidate’s behaviour in an unstructured and indefinite environment.
Psycho-Analytical Methods:
The psycho-analytical methods require the psycho analyst to who can discover many peculiarities of a candidate. This method is carried forward by the father of the school of psychoanalysis. There are 2 types of psycho-analytical methods namely, the Free Association Test & Dream Analysis Method.
These tests provide features and characteristics of a personality in the candidate’s unconscious. This gives the analyst a chance to understand the candidate in his unrestricted mind.
Physical methods or physiological methods:
These methods involve physical instruments in psychometric tests. This type of psychometric personality testing involves physical the assessment of a candidate. Physical activities like respiratory activity, blood pressure, the activity of the heart, electrical activity in the brain, muscular activity and even handwriting are checked in this method. Medically approved instruments are used to assess the candidate in this method of testing.
Surely, these methods sound interesting, don’t they? One last interesting fact about the methodologies of psychometric personality testing is that not all the methodologies are commonly used by recruiters. Some of the methodologies of psychometric personality testing are only used in recruitment procedures like army intelligence.
