I’ve decided to write a mini series of blog posts on psychometric assessment seeing as it’s something I know about (and a service I offer to recruiters). However, in starting the series I realised I might need to give a bit of background so here it is….
Over 15 years ago I worked for an Executive Search company called Highfield. At that point the average salary they placed at was probably c£50,000 and would have been in the consumer goods or business services sectors. They also did some more junior levels on mass – recruiting via assessment centres.
The MD was ex Mars and long versed in the use of psychometric assessment as part of the recruitment process. I presume he’d previously used SHL (who were at the time market leaders in the UK) as that was the company selected to work with. The cost of getting trained by SHL was in the region of £4000 per person….. and I was the person. So off I went on two separate week long residential courses to learn how to run psychometric and aptitude tests.
Over the next five or so years I helped to develop and run many assessment centres and assessed the final interview stage candidates of many assignments.
The consultants at Highfield never seemed concerned that giving psychometric feedback to a client would have a detrimental affect on their chances of placement. Perhaps they were right to be confident in their ability to assess and match candidates – or perhaps (and it was the bullish 90s) they were a tiny bit cocky. However, I do know (remembered from my training with SHL) that interview alone only gives a 10% chance of selecting the right person. Adding in situational based assessments, aptitude tests (verbal, numerical, etc) and psychometrics each increase that chance of getting (and keeping) the right person.
A few things have changed since my days at Highfield. I no longer use SHL as my primary psychometric product provider (I use Saville now and will probably touch on why in a later post), the majority of the clients I work with are now corporate’s rather than recruiters and the internet have provided an opportunity for any company to run “psychometric” testing for peanuts. … But more on that at a future date!
So as I said at the start I’ve decided to write a few blog posts on psychometric assessment.
In order to give me a few ideas I’ve asked, on LinkedIn, for the reasons recruiters (inhouse as well as agency) don’t use them as much as they could – feel free to add your comments.
