As if sending in a resume, preparing a presentation and surviving grillings by humorless interviewers were not enough hoops for job applicants to jump through, employers are now increasingly adding another test to their arsenal, one in which charm and preparation are less useful -- psychometrics.
A survey carried out by Test Agency Hogrefe last year found 80 percent of the FTSE top 100 companies (listed on the London Stock Exchange) used some kind of psychometric evaluation, and the number of companies using them is rising. When Rupert Murdoch wanted to parachute his son James into the top job at BSkyB in 2003, Murdoch Jr first had to sit through a battery of tests. Fortunately for him, he sailed through.
"A psychometric test is an assessment exercise that has been designed to measure a clearly defined aspect of functioning," says Wendy Lord, chief psychologist at Test Agency Hogrefe. "A lot of companies will introduce tests because they are seen as fair and objective."
The British Psychological Society is a big proponent of psychometric techniques and runs its own certification program for human resources staff to qualify in running tests. Its Web site provides a focus for the latest research and new techniques in psychometrics, itself a growing academic discipline with a strong grounding in scientific principles.
"It has been shown that the single best predictor of job performance tends to be general intelligence -- that's fairly widely accepted these days," says Colin Cooper, a psychologist at Queen's University Belfast, Northern Ireland.
"A big meta-analysis done last year looked at the size of the relationship between test scores and a huge range of job-related behaviors. It found that for a huge variety of jobs -- from office work to van driving to management -- the higher your test score, the higher you scored within that particular job," he says.
Psychometrics evolved from this need to examine ability. At the end of the 19th century, French psychologist Alfred Binet worked on some of the first tests to measure children's ability. The US army developed its own tests to help recruit fresh troops for World War I, the so-called Alpha tests designed to work quickly through the hundreds of thousands of applicants and work out who had the required education and background.
More notoriously, the tests went through a period of popularity with eugenicists -- something psychologists are still trying to live down -- with the invention of IQ and aptitude tests.
Broadly speaking, there are two types of psychometric test. The first measures ability -- verbal or numerical reasoning, for example.
The second measures personality traits such as how a person might behave in a given situation or what motivates them.
In the world of work, tests are increasingly tailored to the jobs they are used for.
"The choice of test is absolutely crucial," Lord says. "In order to decide to use a test, you must first analyze a job in terms of what makes one person more successful at it than another. You must be absolutely clear that what you're measuring is relevant to job performance." he says.
Building a test from scratch involves plenty of groundwork. John Rust, professor of psychometrics at City University, London, England, and new director of the Cambridge Assessment Center, UK, says psychometric tests must satisfy four central ideals: They must work in the same way for all participants, actually measure what they claim to measure, be free from bias and have the capability to be standardized.
"First of all, you would build up a job specification," Rust says. "You would identify the things a person might need to know and understand, how they need to apply that knowledge, and so on."
Often this involves interviewing the people who are already in the job, or customers and line managers. "That process is purely about the job at this stage, what makes people good at it," Lord says.
Once the job has been specified, you would think of ways of assessing people for it, which could include multiple choice questionnaires, interviews or assessment centers.
"You would then find a group of people who would be similar to the candidates on which to trial it," Rust says. "You would then do a statistical analysis to find out which items are actully functioning -- some items everybody answers the same way, for example, so that's not very helpful you want to have some division."
Testers then need to be trained in how to use it and interpret its results.
"There should be a good manual for any published test," Rust says. "Anybody can put a test on the Internet; most of them will be things people have thrown together as a joke. But reputable test publishers have been around for a long time and they have a reputation to protect."
Some skills, such as numeracy or language, are easy to test. Others -- creativity, for example -- are more nebulous.
"Lots of people criticize creativity tests because they are very hard to do," Rust says. "Given that, companies still need creative people; they advertise for them. People are assessing it. The question is, are any of these assessments reliable or valid?"
Rust does believe creativity can be tested. He cites the example, now used more often in psychology lectures than human resources departments, of giving a candidate a brick and asking them to come up with as many uses for it as possible.
Here psychometrics enters a grey area.
"Using personality tests for personnel selection is sometimes regarded as controversial," Cooper says.
"The difficulty is that people can often perceive what characteristics are desirable -- you're unlikely to admit to having hallucinations. People who answer honestly might be at a disadvantage and this tends to show up if you look at the relationship between test scores and performance," he says.
Correlations between personality test scores and job performance are often weaker than a similar comparison with ability-based tests, he adds.
Another concern revolves around the potential for racial or gender bias in tests.
"If you find that members of a minority group perform poorly on a test, is this also reflected in job performance? Or does the test unfairly underestimate the member of the ethnic minority?" Cooper says.
On the plus side, standardized methods of creating psychometric tests can help balance out weaknesses in the selectors.
"There's been a lot of studies looking at the relative merits of interviews with psychometric tests," Cooper says.
"Psychometric tests invariably come out better. None of the biases of the interviewers can affect the scores of the test. Members of an interview panel might be unaware that they apply different standards when they're interviewing members of racial minorities. A test is impervious to that," Cooper says.
"It's much easier to identify a bad test than it is to identify a bad interviewer," Lord says.
Discriminating between people is what the tests are all about, of course, but testers have to use them with care.
"We're very much aware of the equal opportunities issues and the consequences of what we're doing," Rust says. "It's all very high stakes stuff."
Claims of nepotism can tarnish a company's reputation, and psychometric tests can help here by showing a firm is objective in how it recruits.
But there are limits.
"There's no such thing as a perfect test that will predict performance," Cooper says. "If you're selecting HR managers, you will need a different test than if you're selecting applicants for medical school."
Lord has some advice for test takers.
"What people worry about most when they're taking tests is that they don't finish. I don't think it's emphasized enough that the tests are actually designed not to be finished and few people do finish them," he says.
Ultimately, psychometrics are only ever used by companies in the context of a wider selection process, Lord says.
"The test will only inform the decision -- it won't make their decision," he says.
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