How does a psychometric test work?

When one talks about the history of psychometric test, it goes back to a few years. The evolvement of this test and how this testing process began, when one wants to know about it; it basically started in the 19th century at Cambridge. If one wants to know the exact year of it then it may be around the years 1886 to 89. In fact, the first ever laboratory for the science of this psychometric test was set up in the Cavendish Physics Library which is located in Cambridge University and that too in the year 1887. The person who did the laboratory was named as MckeenCattell.

The laboratory was set as said above, in the year 1887 but the personality test (the very first one) was conducted much later, in 1917. A person called Robert Woodworth actually made a thing called personal data sheet on which the test was conducted. This data sheet was a very simple one and it had some question which one taking the test was supposed to answer with only a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’. Now why this sheet was created? Well, this was done in order to select and screen out the candidates who wanted to get recruited in World War I and the authority wanted to conduct a psychoneurosis test on them. After that, this pain date sheet had some other additions and inventions and that gradually lead to some more aspects of a personality test. In the later years like 1950 and 1960, there was another set of personality test that was evolved and it was named as the ‘Big Five’. This test was actually formulated after doing a very deep and thorough analytical research on how to measure the individual differences in a single personality.

Some may have a curiosity regarding what kind of psychometric tests are conducted on human beings. Well, this mainly happens by focusing on 2 major areas. One is, to assess all the personal qualities and to be clear about an individual’s understanding and their feelings through this test process. This is only to find out some character traits of an individual and that too without judging them on the basis on right or wrong. The other one is to measure and find out whether the profile of an applicant matches with the job type they have applied for. They should match what the recruiters need.

This again as has been mentioned earlier, had started long back during the time of recruitment in the World War I and since then the inclusion of psychometric test in the recruitment process has come a long way. They are now used in educational institutions and in many corporate organizations and that too in a large scale because the science behind this testing process is helping them a lot in choosing the right candidate at the end of the day. There have been a lot of researches and surveys on this and most of them have come to the conclusion that HR team of any company gets hugely benefitted if they include a psychometric test in their recruitment process. That is why; this testing process has become a very important thing when it comes to recruitment.

This testing process helps an organization in better filtering the number of applicants and they can easily narrow down the list of the candidates by conducting this test at the very beginning of the recruitment process. Not only that this way of testing can also help in the staff training procedures and helps the organization to check the internal performance of each and every employee during the time of their appraisals. There are also some educational institutes that can use psychometric testing in their entrance examination procedure so that they can check out whether the applicant has the aptitude and the ability to study there.

These tests can mainly be divided into 2 groups. They are:

Aptitude and Ability Test

Personality and Questionnaires.

This is a particular test which is conducted so that one can check the intellectual ability of an individual along with their competence level. This also helps one to measure the logical skill and the analytical skill of a candidate so that one can choose the right candidate for the job. The testing can also have some subdivision like:

Verbal reasoning

Diagrammatic Reasoning

Numerical reasoning

Strategic reasoning

Here, the major goal is to understand, if the behavioral traits of an applicant are justified for the company or not. This means, here the recruiters can see how an individual react can and try to solve a problem in a given situation or at the moment of crisis in work. Here, the HR team gets an overall view of a candidate and see if they are perfectly suitable for the job or not. And the testing process is mainly based on the paper-based questionnaires.

But when one sits for a psychometric test, time also plays a very important role. There are some tests that are conducted in such a way that they have a very strict time limit and one can easily verify the speed level of an applicant because in a job sometimes there are deadlines and one has to complete the task within that deadline. So giving a time limit in the testing process also makes it clear whether the applicant is capable of completing a task within the given time or not.

Thus proper psychometric testing can be really helpful in both bigger and smaller organizations so that one can pick the right employees.