Psychometric Testing - Any Advice
- Thread starter Niallymac
- Start date
I'm intrigued. Aren't these tests a statistical attempt to determine what your personality type is?
They ask a series of questions and assign you in some kind of matrix of personality types given the results of your scores.
There would be a series of control questions to catch out people who are trying to appear different to what they are.
The results are sent off to some other company for analysis and they come back with who best fits the job profile.
Now comes the books that show you how to cheat the test and pick out the questions that are the contra-indicators, the ones that prove despite your attempt to hide it, that you are disorganised and passive aggressive (or whatever). And now, you can answer that one as well with the help of this book.
Where is this all leading us??? Where are the skilled HR managers who assess the candidates? Why are they paying a third party to perform these tests? What does that show you about the ability of these companies to do their own promotion and hiring properly?
I think these tests are invasive, patronising and show that the people ordering the tests don't have the confidence in themselves (or their managers don't) to use their own skills and intuitions.
I'm afraid I despair of the corporate life
! I've seen every fad come and go in the last decade, first Mission Statements, then "Seven Habits of Highly Effective people", next "Who ate my cheese?", now psychobabble meets sudoku :- the psychometric test!
If you asked whoever suggested this test to take it truthfully then perhaps it would indicate that they're an unimaginitive drone following the latest HR concept du jour.
Good luck beating the test or else for fun just fill it in at random and see the furrowed brow on your HR manager's face.
See some links here for advice
[broken link removed]
http://jobsadvice.guardian.co.uk/tests/story/0,,1181168,00.html
They ask a series of questions and assign you in some kind of matrix of personality types given the results of your scores.
There would be a series of control questions to catch out people who are trying to appear different to what they are.
The results are sent off to some other company for analysis and they come back with who best fits the job profile.
Now comes the books that show you how to cheat the test and pick out the questions that are the contra-indicators, the ones that prove despite your attempt to hide it, that you are disorganised and passive aggressive (or whatever). And now, you can answer that one as well with the help of this book.
Where is this all leading us??? Where are the skilled HR managers who assess the candidates? Why are they paying a third party to perform these tests? What does that show you about the ability of these companies to do their own promotion and hiring properly?
I think these tests are invasive, patronising and show that the people ordering the tests don't have the confidence in themselves (or their managers don't) to use their own skills and intuitions.
I'm afraid I despair of the corporate life
! I've seen every fad come and go in the last decade, first Mission Statements, then "Seven Habits of Highly Effective people", next "Who ate my cheese?", now psychobabble meets sudoku :- the psychometric test! If you asked whoever suggested this test to take it truthfully then perhaps it would indicate that they're an unimaginitive drone following the latest HR concept du jour.
Good luck beating the test or else for fun just fill it in at random and see the furrowed brow on your HR manager's face.
See some links here for advice
[broken link removed]
http://jobsadvice.guardian.co.uk/tests/story/0,,1181168,00.html
go to the library and get a few books out on it. There are loads now as there is an increse in jobs requireing these tests. They are not all designed to test your personallity but spacial reasoning and numerical reasoning, understading the writted word etc.
I did one totally unprepared because i was of that opinion only to be told to do decimal sums against the clock (that i have done on calculator since 3rd year) It was fairly miserable - i passed but only just. It pays to do your homework.
All the best
I did one totally unprepared because i was of that opinion only to be told to do decimal sums against the clock (that i have done on calculator since 3rd year) It was fairly miserable - i passed but only just. It pays to do your homework.
All the best
Having done some work in a HR Department a few years ago, you are right them. The tests are very expensive to buy (and not to be photocopied...), but were marked in house. It is easy to place plastic card over a answer sheet and count up the marks! They take a way from proper HR skills. It is just another system to follow blindly.
They have different types of tests for different jobs and job levels. By and large they seemed to give correct results for personality. But when one of the best managers did one (just to see that they were like) he failed it, much to the surprise to the head of HR who expressed an opinion that he was lucky to have gotten his job before they started doing the tests! Another potential employee who was a qualified Actuary, with full marks in the leaving etc barely passed his test.
Towger
The tests i did were like true or false: 0.25 -0.052 = 0.07 etc against the clock. it was for desk job - why would i need to do these calculations manually in the age of calculators and computers?
Mad.
Thanks for the advice. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of what they are doing is that most if not all of the candidates have been working for the organisation for more than 10-15 years (public sector).
I can understand if you are taking in external candidates and you want to try to get a feel for their operating style/personality profile, but with guys that have been around since they were in short pants, do you not think that senior management would have an idea as to what they are after.
Anyway, I'll head off for my psychiatric testing and who knows, I may even be mad enough for them to offer me a job !!!!
Thks
I can understand if you are taking in external candidates and you want to try to get a feel for their operating style/personality profile, but with guys that have been around since they were in short pants, do you not think that senior management would have an idea as to what they are after.
Anyway, I'll head off for my psychiatric testing and who knows, I may even be mad enough for them to offer me a job !!!!
Thks
I've just been reading Freakonomics... A good book about hidden trends in statistics.
One example given in the book is that students whose parents chose voluntarily to move to a "better" school through a lottery did better not because of the school itself but because the act of choice indicated the parents were more interested in their child's welfare than those who didn't enter the lottery, or got to the school by default.
Likewise, this test is meant to check up on your innate abilities, but actually what it is showing is that the person who actually went to the bother of finding out what the test was, and potentially answered the questions in a not entirely truthful manner, because the book told them a better answer, is the best person to do the job because they went to all the trouble of doing so. It kind of defeats the purpose.
If you could erase any knowledge of what a Psychometric test is from someones brain prior to the test then it might actually accurately measure what it is meant to be doing, but of course you can't
Looks like you want the job and are prepared to sit through this guff to get there. You'll go a long way!
One example given in the book is that students whose parents chose voluntarily to move to a "better" school through a lottery did better not because of the school itself but because the act of choice indicated the parents were more interested in their child's welfare than those who didn't enter the lottery, or got to the school by default.
Likewise, this test is meant to check up on your innate abilities, but actually what it is showing is that the person who actually went to the bother of finding out what the test was, and potentially answered the questions in a not entirely truthful manner, because the book told them a better answer, is the best person to do the job because they went to all the trouble of doing so. It kind of defeats the purpose.
If you could erase any knowledge of what a Psychometric test is from someones brain prior to the test then it might actually accurately measure what it is meant to be doing, but of course you can't
Looks like you want the job and are prepared to sit through this guff to get there. You'll go a long way!
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