How do Psychometrics Positively Impact the Quality of Hire Factor?
In an increasingly competitive hiring market, recruiting the right person and getting them in the right job should be more than a lofty goal, it’s more like a necessity. A bad hire is costly, not only in financial terms, but on team dynamics and productivity-wise. When facing such challenges, precision methods are greatly needed to increase the quality of hire and optimize new-hire integration.
What is Quality of Hire (QoH)?
Quality of hire is a recruiting metric that refers to the value a new hire adds to an organization, based on benchmarks such as longevity, performance and team integration.
How are the new recruits faring?
Have our recruiters managed to source solid candidates that fit into our ecosystem?
Are our new recruits improving company performance and in what way?
Measuring quality of hire is crucial when assessing how effective your talent acquisition team has been and with a view to optimize recruiting processes over time.
Psychometrics for Hiring Purposes
Psychometric assessments are used to measure personality traits, cognitive aptitudes and other crucial job-related skills – and can prove transformative in the recruiting domain.
Psychometric tests provide objective and measurable data – for a more accurate and thorough analysis of each candidate’s innate behavioral style and mindset – to greatly facilitate selection and pick the best profiles for a given role.
Psychometric Test Types
Psychometric assessments can be broken down into categories, each serving a distinct purpose.
- Personality Tests assess personality traits – typically openness, consciousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism – based on the well-known Big Five model which is known for its consensus-based approach and reliability.
- IQ and Aptitude Tests assess cognitive abilities such as logic, verbal understanding and problem solving – all crucial to performing well in a demanding workplace setting.
- Skill Tests are designed to assess specific task-related skills or technical know-how for a concrete sense of a candidate’s ability to perform specific tasks in a specific context.
- Work Values or Workplace Communications Tests look beyond skills and personality to a person’s fundamental values and communication preferences in order to check for alignment with a specific business culture.
Exercising Due Caution in Psychometric Testing
It is imperative to choose wisely when it comes to psychometric tools, so that they correspond to the business need and hiring objectives. Instruments such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® (MBTI®), while popular in team-building and staff development endeavors, are not recommended as recruiting tools due to the lack of depth within the data (granularity) in this kind of tool.
To know if a psychometric assessment is appropriate for recruiting, it needs to be reliable and scientifically validated, i.e. it needs to measure what it purports to measure in a coherent, consistent and reproducible manner.
Picking Reliable and Valid Assessment Tools
When picking a psychometric tool, the focus should first be on finding proper and comprehensive evidence of its validity and reliability levels. The reliability of a test refers to it having consistent, coherent and reproducible findings, while validity means it measures what it is supposed to measure.
Test providers must be able to provide evidence of technical manuals or reports attesting to the aforementioned scientifically based qualities. Documentation is key to having confidence in the findings, and thereby knowing that your recruiting decisions are justified and pertinent.
Using a psychometric tool which has not been validated (or with insufficient validation) can prove more prejudicial than using no tool at all.
At Ngenio, we employ rigorous methods for scientific validation in order to guarantee the precision and accuracy of our MPO tool. We diligently respect American Psychological Association (APA), U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), Canadian Psychological Association (CPA) and Québec Labour Commission norms.
This level of compliance acts as certification that our MPO psychometric instrument is not only valid and reliable when discerning personality traits and cognitive abilities, but also follows ethical and legal norms in place. You can hence be sure that it is safe to use in a wide range of workplace settings.
Conclusion? Quality of Hire Metrics Reinforce HR’s Position as a Strategic Partner
In workplaces where quality of hire directly impacts business success, having a reliable and validated psychometric tool on hand has become indispensable.
Not only can these tools help with precision hiring, they also give Human Resource professionals robust data to support the decision-making process.
By properly measuring candidate personality traits and skills, MPO ensures that each new recruit can have a positive impact on team dynamics and productivity.
Aligning your recruiting practices with a reliable psychometric assessment tool can emphasize the importance of the quality of hire metric on overall business performance.
Ready to see how MPO might optimize your recruiting efforts and reinforce your role as a strategic business partner within your organization?
Get in touch for a demo! We’d love to show how we can level up your talent acquisition process.