What a psychometric test entails

It might sound intimidating but the key is preparation and bringing out the best aspects of your personality, advises TANIA NGIMA

The face-to-face interview has been around for a long time and continues to retain validity as an employee selection process. However, many employers, especially those running multinational operations are running other parallel processes such as assessment centres and psychometric tests. In fact for some employers, the psychometric tests weeds out a few more candidates in between then ‘I am impressed enough with your application to give you a hearing’ and ‘Let us have a face-to-face interview’ stages. These methods save employers money in recruiting costs. However, what exactly do they entail for the candidate?

Psychometric tests

If you are one of the people who would rather have your CV and application do the speaking for you, you’re not alone. Tests are stressful and sometimes it feels as if they are designed to bring out the worst in us.

Preparation is everything. Psychometric tests cover a whole range of areas; diagrammatic, numerical, aptitude and verbal reasoning and personality tests.

It is important to ensure that, in your skills analysis you bring out the best aspects of your personality to ensure that your personality test does not contradict this.

In the same way, if you claim that you have strong analytical skills but your tests prove otherwise it may raise eyebrows, therefore the old piece of advice about being as truthful as you can in your written documents holds relevance here.

As many of these tests will be taken online, it is important to know your way around a computer, as well as practicing to increase your speed.

Look out for web sites that offer the tests online for free as these will help in improving your proficiency and speed. The more of them you attempt, the better you will get at drawing connections and answering the questions.

Assessment centres

These may easily be the most challenging of all candidate selection procedures. Assessment centres entail being in team environments where observations are made regarding teamwork, leadership skills, reasoning through challenges, keeping calm under stressful situations, engaging in problem solving activities and all the while against other competitors for the position.

These take the form of in-tray exercises, role playing, group discussions and presentations. While you can do a lot of research on these, nothing beats practical experience.

It may be useful to try this out with friends and envisage different ways of tackling problems in a calm rational manner.

There are also a few organisations that offer this kind of training though the practise has not caught on enough to make it reasonably priced.

Also, remember to brush upon your presentation skills should this be one of the tasks required of you.