Understand more about why they’re used and what they mean
If you are completing ability assessments, please make sure you also look at the practice questions we sent you.
Employers want a clear picture of who you are, your fit for the role, and your fit for the organisation. Plenty of people undersell themselves in interviews, but shine when assessed and reference checked (and vice versa!). Rather than relying on just an interview, organisations want to triangulate a few sources of information about you. Psychometrics are part of this.
This depends on the type of assessment used.
This type of assessment provides insight into your typical style. It cannot tell how good you are at behaving in this manner. For example, a personality questionnaire might imply that you prefer to be organised and pay attention to the details, but it cannot actually tell whether or not you will be good at this!
Further, personality questionnaires cannot perfectly predict how you will behave in a given situation. Even though you may have a preference around how you like to behave, there may be situations or contexts that require or force you to behave differently to this. It is for this reason that your preferences are described tentatively, i.e. as your likely behaviour when left to your own devices, as opposed to a definitive prediction of exactly how you will behave in a given situation.
This type of assessment provides insight into what gets you up in the morning, what you need in life to be happy and satisfied, how to best manage and motivate you and what you will need from an organisation to feel satisfied in your role. It also allows the organisation to think about whether your priorities are aligned with their priorities; although anyone who has worked in an organisation before will know that the whole organisation is not usually perfectly aligned in this area. Therefore, the information regarding your priorities is used to prompt a discussion, rather than determine whether or not you are a good ‘fit’ for an organisation.
This type of assessment provides insight into the behaviours you are likely to demonstrate under pressure or when you are not moderating how you are coming across to others. It may reflect or exaggerate your typical style, or contradict it.
These types of assessments measure your likely potential to, for example, draw accurate conclusions from written information (verbal reasoning), draw accurate conclusions from ambiguous and complex written information (critical thinking), use numbers to solve problems (numerical reasoning), or grasp concepts outside of your previous training or experience (abstract / conceptual reasoning).
A ‘desirable candidate’ is one where the likely strengths and development areas highlighted in the psychometrics are reinforced by other sources, and largely match the role’s requirements. Even then, there is no such thing as a ‘perfect’ candidate for a role.
My advice is, don’t try to cheat them!
With personality questionnaires in particular, you will have likely ‘strengths’ and possible ‘flipsides’ associated with your results. This means that a characteristic that is a ‘strength’ in one context may well be a ‘flipside’ in another context. In other words, there is no ‘perfect’ profile. The more candid you are, the more likely you will only get the role if it is right for you. Otherwise, you risk being a creative, flexible, abstract thinker; stuck in a repetitive, process-oriented, administrative role.
If you are still tempted to try to cheat, remember that the triangulation process (i.e. the process of matching your CV with your psychometric results and your reference checks) is likely to pick up any inconsistencies. While personality questionnaires don’t have ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answers, we can usually tell if you have tried to ‘game’ the assessment.
It is very hard to cheat on ability assessments (like verbal and numerical reasoning) as they are typically supervised and timed.
Hiring decisions should not be based solely on psychometric results. Instead, they should be the basis for further exploration. This means you should never be told, “You’ve got the job, you just need to pass the psychometrics.”
With personality and values and drivers questionnaires, there are no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answers, so you cannot ‘fail’ these assessments.
With ability assessments, there is often only one right answer. Therefore, it is advisable to work as quickly and accurately as you can. However, the results are not reported as they may have been at school. Rather than being reported as “You got 50% of the questions right”, your results are reported as a percentile score. In other words, if you are told you have scored at the 50th percentile compared to managers, it means that you scored better than 50% of the comparison group of managers – meaning that your results are ‘on par’ with other managers. This is an important distinction. Think of it this way: if the assessment is really easy, and most people score 80 out of 100, then it means that 60 out of 100 is probably not a very good score. However, if most people score 10 out of 100, a score of 60 out of 100 will be an exceptional score. It is for this reason that we report your percentile score, or how your performance compares with others, rather than a percentage score. The comparison group is also important. For example, you may score at the 50th percentile compared to managers, but the 90th percentile compared to the general population. The percentile score itself is meaningless without reference to the comparison group.
If you do happen to perform poorly compared to the comparison group, we do not take this result at face-value. Rather than concluding that you do not possess the ability measured, we say that the assessment has not given us the evidence we need to conclude that you adequately possess this ability. The organisation may follow this up in either the interview, reference checks or by sampling an example of your work, to triangulate your ability results.
No. A candidate who is perfectly suited to one role may be ill-suited to another. There are no objectively ‘good’ or objectively ‘bad’ candidates – it all depends on the context!
Further, even if you are a great candidate for a role, it may be that there is someone even better suited to it. Alternatively, it may be that there is another candidate who does not possess all the wonderful attributes that you do, but happens to demonstrate a particular strength that both you and the organisation are currently missing, and that is sorely needed.
Try not be disheartened if you do not secure a particular role, and try to focus on applying for roles that largely leverage your strengths.
There are a number of benefits to you.
The first is that it ensures a level playing field. All candidates who undergo the assessments have the same opportunity to demonstrate the competencies being assessed. This may be particularly important for candidates who possess certain skills and attributes, but have not yet had the opportunity to demonstrate these in previous roles.
The second is that the type of assessments you are given may provide you with further insight into the demands of the role. If you hate maths and are given a challenging numerical reasoning assessment, this signals that the role requires advanced numerical reasoning skills.
The third is that you will have an opportunity to share your views on the results so that the results are interpreted in context. You will also get the chance to better understand your likely ‘strengths’ and ‘flipsides’, the kinds of roles you may be suited to and the areas you might like to develop. Candidates who go through our process routinely comment on how enlightening and enjoyable the feedback conversation is, and how much they have benefitted from the process in terms of their own development – even though it is a recruitment rather than development process.
Yes, for a fee, you can get a Development Report. It will help you better understand your strengths and development areas, and provide some suggestions and guidance on how to create a meaningful development plan. This report is for your benefit only, and may not be forwarded to potential employers. Most candidates who go through our process find that the feedback conversation is so comprehensive (usually around 1.5-2 hours) that they have a good understanding of their results without the written report. The psychometric assessment report that goes to the organisation remains confidential to the organisation.
Psychometric assessments are always conducted in a particular context (e.g. to support your development or for a particular role) and this can affect how the results are interpreted and reported.
If you have recently completed some psychometrics and are asked to do this again by another employer, get in touch with us to discuss. There are some instances where you may not need to redo the assessments, but this will depend on a number of factors, including how recently you completed the assessments, the type of assessments you completed, etc.
Yes, you can. Some reasons why you might want to be assessed include:
Get in touch to discuss as we’d love to help.
(c) Winning Performance Limited 2008 - 2025
Comments are closed.