Psychometrics: What our professional partners are seeing in practice
Add to that
movements such as Black Lives Matter and Me Too, and increasing calls for more
diversity and inclusion across the globe and we’re likely to see a greater
emphasis than ever before on objective decision-making in recruitment and on
reducing the effects of subconscious bias.
Tanya Hudson and
Susan Kealy are organisational psychologists with Kinch Lyons, a trusted distributer of the
Podium assessment suite and online
psychometric testing accreditation programme. They caught up for a chat to discuss the
powerful role that psychometrics can play in these trends. The key take-aways from their discussion are
highlighted below.
Virtual Recruitment and On-boarding
Interviews and
on-boarding are currently virtual for most companies. This means hiring
managers cannot get an in-person sense
of someone in the way that they would with a physical interview. Therefore
companies are beginning to rely on more objective data-based sources, such as
psychometrics, to help them understand their candidates.
With respect to on-boarding, the first few weeks of induction can be
a great opportunity for HR and management to learn more about a person’s values,
learning styles, and how they can best be supported. As people are on-boarded
virtually those data points cannot come through the same in-person means and so
psychometrics can help to fill that gap.
Remote Working
Given the
dramatic increase in remote working, and the probability that many companies
will continue with these practices after things return to normal, an enhanced
skill set is now needed.
Employees
working from home will need to be self-starters and independent workers as well
as to be reliable, and organised. Personality and values-based assessments can
be a great way of identifying who will succeed within this new structure.
Diversity
There is
increasing organisational focus on diversity and inclusion, alongside a growing awareness of our own
susceptibility to our subconscious bias, which can be an enormous problem in
selection, where interviewers may unwittingly prefer those who appear more
similar to themselves, or form other non-job-related-perceptions.
Psychometrics
are a source of objective data, and companies that introduce them can be seen
to be making a commitment to fairer hiring practices, leading to more diverse
workplaces. Ultimately, as much research
has shown, diversity will likely have a positive impact on culture, innovation
and the bottom line.
Employee Support and Development
Change and
uncertainty has meant that employee wellbeing and resilience is fast becoming a
workplace priority, and organisations are looking to psychometrics to provide
frameworks to help them to create support and development programmes for their
people.
Increased
home-working may mean that extra support is needed, as employees struggle with
isolation, a lack of communication, work-life balance or more.
Psychometric
tools such as Podium’s
“Pulse” survey is designed to help
organisations gain a real-time understanding of an employee’s well-being and unique challenges, and to determine how to best support people.
Process Review
The economic
uncertainty resulting from the pandemic has forced many companies to delay
projects which they had scheduled. Companies have had more time to review and optimise
their internal procedures and to put into practice plans that may have existed
for some time.
Given that
psychometrics are one of the strongest predictors of employee performance, it
is likely that many companies simply have had more time to modify recruitment
practices in order to incorporate them.
All of these
developments have meant that people are waking up to the power of psychometrics
and we are beginning to see a push for HR teams to become accredited and savvy
in the ways of these tools.
Tanya Hudson and Susan Kealy are organisational psychologists at Kinch Lyons, an international psychology firm specialising in the selection and development of human capital and a trusted partner of Podium.