Why use psychological tests within your selection process? Isn’t this expensive? Don’t you use these tests only for senior executive appointments? Do I need special training or an organizational psychologist to perform and interpret the test and its results?

These are common questions asked by our team in the AssessSystems field every day. Psychological profiling for employee selection and development has come a long way in the last 10 years. Tests typically cover two broad areas.

The first is related to the personal attributes of the candidates, their innate characteristics or personality, this gives us an idea of ​​how a candidate will behave at work: their attitude.

The second area is mental abilities; examples here are numerical, verbal, abstract thinking, mechanical skills, coding and verification tests, etc. This gives us an idea of ​​the learning capacity of the candidates, how do they solve problems? How is your critical thinking? Can they quickly learn the required job skills?

The jobs are different. People are different. Sometimes even the right person can’t do the job as well as expected. This raises the question: “What individual differences discriminate between the best and the average, what separates the best from the rest?”

All work needs to “fit” with the person’s knowledge, skills, experience, mental capacity, personality, attitudes and motivations (KSAME). Not all people meet the required level in each of these areas. The greater the mismatch between a person’s KSAME and the requirements of the job, the more likely mistakes, bad attitudes, and turnover are to occur.

When people are hired or promoted to the wrong jobs, productivity suffers and morale plummets. Personality and mental ability tests help prevent the wrong person from matching the wrong job.

The tree analogy is a good graphic example of the selection process; the candidates only let you see what they want you to know. What they hide from you is the danger.

The fruits of the tree represent the knowledge, skill and experience to do the job; this is revealed through resume, interview and references. This is learned behavior and therefore trainable, trainable, and observable. This area tells us if they CAN do the job.

The roots of the tree is what is hidden. This relates to HOW, or WILL, they do the job. This is the area that most hiring managers don’t check. This relates to the innate personality and general intellect of the candidate. This is where you find out a person’s work attitude, how he will behave in certain situations; you can only get this through psychological profiling. It can also be argued that it is not trainable – it is who we are – our innate personality characteristics.

By the way, don’t be fooled by the experience. A candidate may have had ten years of experience, but it may really have been a year, that was wrong and they have done it nine times!

Remember, for most non-technical jobs it’s better to hire on the basis of attitudes and train for aptitude: you can teach people how to do a job, but you can’t teach them the innate personality traits and mental abilities that they govern how, or if they should. I will do it.

Through the use of Psychological Profiles, interests, attitude, motivation and mental abilities can now be effectively assessed, helping managers predict and train performance with incredible accuracy by being able to answer questions like these:

Will the person be “customer driven”?

How will the person handle stress, work pace, and working with other people?

Will they be trustworthy and trustworthy?

How is your follow-up, personal organization?

Are they motivated to persuade and influence customers to buy?

Will they have the ability to handle simple calculations and verbal interactions?

Psychological profiling helps you reliably and legally identify employees who are dependable and hard-working, good team players, and who have the potential to be high-performing leaders, managers, and salespeople.

The psychological profile helps hiring managers and business owners differentiate between leaders and followers, inspires and demotivates, decisive and bland, emotionally stable and easily excited, organized and reactive, extroverted and reserved, bold and risk averse, competitive. and cooperative, assertive and shy.

Psychological profiling can even help identify whether employees are likely to be productive or disruptive. The good news is that it doesn’t take radical surgery to go from hiring “just okay” to “great” employees, no matter the size of your company. You can streamline your business starting with your next hire by placing your employees in the right place, in the right way, using a structured interview approach, and backing this up with psychological profiling. The cost is negligible, considering that it has been estimated that a wrong hire costs the employer between 40 and 60% of the annual salary.

Many people perceive psychological testing as expensive, the dominance of senior executive appointments, depending on role; costs range from $50 to $500. Total interview kits applicable to a specific job position cost around $50. It’s amazing how many managers argue about spending a couple hundred dollars to “get it right the first time.”

At AssessSystems, we have a saying: “Why hire a turkey and teach it to climb a tree? Wouldn’t it be better to hire a squirrel?”