Posts Tagged ‘psychological testing’

Psych Tests & What They’re For

Sunday, September 2nd, 2012

The main reason we write this blog is to help bridge the gap between the general world of work, and the more technical subject of psychometric assessment for the workplace. While our psychology practice specialises in providing psychometric testing, our underlying commitment is to helping everyone achieve career and life satisfaction through good job fit.

For individuals, if you do what you like to do and what you are good at, then you can live a happier and more fulfilled life. For organisations and employers, if you find the right staff, you can maximize efficiency, engagement, culture fit and teamwork.

Psychometric assessment used well is a very useful tool to help achieve this.

Everyone understands the general concepts of work and what it’s for: we go to work to earn income, to provide product and services to the general community and we keep the economy turning over. But psychometrics, on the other hand, can seem more mysterious. Despite a growing use of psychometric assessment in the workplace, to the extent that these days most people will have been psych tested for an employment role at some time in their career, how psych testing works is not so generally well understood.

Essentially, there are two kinds of psych tests for the workplace: Ability (or Aptitude) and Personality assessments. In simple terms, Ability assessments tell us if a person can do a given job, and Personality assessments tell us how a person will do the job.

Even though there seem to be hundreds of psych tests for the workplace available (and of various usefulness and validity), which all make different claims for our attention, in the end, the important thing to know is that they assess personality and ability. And that makes things more straightforward to understand.

The other thing to understand is that psychometric assessments are simply a statistical analysis of data that is provided by the person who attempts the assessment. They are not magic, they can’t read minds, and they are not designed to trick you (although they do have measures built in to tell if someone is cheating). By asking a respondent to answer a number of questions, the answers can then be put together statistically to give a result. This result then provides a picture for the candidate and the employer.

Psychometric assessment should never be used in isolation, but always as part of a recruitment or selection process, or for staff development down the track. Psychometric assessment provides an objective measure that fits into and integrates with a wider Human Resources process that includes interviews, resume and reference checks.

Some psych tests are better and more credible than others, just as some psychometric providers are more expert, knowledgeable and helpful than others, but what all psych tests have in common is that they statistically use answers to questions given by a respondent to provide an overview or picture.

In the end, psychometric assessment is used in the workplace because it provides an objective and cost-effective way (since it can save a lot of time and effort) to help employers make decisions about their staff. And for individuals, it can help us understand more about ourselves, and the way we work.

Work is essential to adult life, and the more fulfilling it is, the more balanced and satisfying our lives can be. In Human Resources and the world of work, psychometric assessments can have an important role in achieving good job fit and ultimately that means work-life balance.

 

Lynette Jensen

Lynette Jensen is a director and co-founder of Genesys Australia and is committed to helping people achieve work-life balance through good job fit. In addition to contributing to this blog, she also writes regularly for HR Daily Community and Dynamic Business Magazine. Her articles have been re-published in India & the United Kingdom.

Please click on heading to leave a comment. More posts below.

NB: We are an independent workplace psychology practice. All views expressed here are our own and are the opinions of Stephen Kohl and his associates, which do not necessarily reflect those of the publisher and developer of GeneSys assessments, Psytech International.

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Who Are You? “Know Thyself”

Friday, March 2nd, 2012

Since ancient times, when Know Thyself was inscribed in the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, people have known that it is important to understand as much as we can about ourselves.  For years, philosophers, psychologists and ordinary people have asked themselves, “Who am I?”

It’s an important question, because the more you know about yourself, the more you understand what makes you happy, what sort of things you are good at, what paths in life you can take, what work you should choose to do and how you fit into the rest of the world.

Psychometrics is a branch of Psychology which aims to help answer the question, “Who Are You?”. Psychometrics does this by asking a person a number of questions and then statistically collating the answers so that a clear and accurate picture is produced. Some people know who they are, what their abilities and values are and what careers they are good at and that make them feel satisfied and fulfilled. But most of us are not so clear.

By completing psychometric tests and assessments, we can find out a lot about ourselves, including what sort of personality we have, how we like to learn, what our strengths and weaknesses, what kind of jobs we are likely to succeed in, and how we like to interact with other people.

Psychometrics can be used in a variety of ways and for many reasons: clinical practitioners use psychometrics to diagnose various conditions and disorders, employers often use psychometrics to help select candidates for job roles or to develop their staff, psychometrics can be used to diagnose creativity and increase innovation, or for career guidance, and psychometrics is even used by dating agencies to match potential “soul mates”!

If we know who we are and how we like to work, we can make better decisions, better life and work choices and live happier, more productive and satisfied lives.

 

 Watch Video: Who Are You? The Who

Lynette Jensen

Lynette Jensen is a director and co-founder of Genesys Australia and is committed to helping people achieve work-life balance through good job fit. In addition to contributing to this blog, she also writes regularly for HR Daily Community and Dynamic Business Magazine. Her articles have been re-published in India & the United Kingdom.

Please click on heading to leave a comment. More posts below.

Related Posts:

Keep Psychometric Assessment Scientific

More “Style” than Substance

Psychometric Juggernaut: SHL & Previsor Merge

Cheating on Psych Tests

NB: We are an independent workplace psychology practice. All views expressed here are our own and are the opinions of Stephen Kohl & his associates, which do not necessarily reflect those of the publisher and developer of GeneSys assessments, Psytech International.

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Play to Your Strengths

Saturday, February 18th, 2012

When I was a child growing up in the middle suburbs of Sydney, every household seemed to religiously read The Australian Women’s Weekly. It was a cultural and social mainstay: both a barometer and a bible.

One of the main things I learned from the Women’s Weekly is to play to your strengths. Over and over again, and in various ways, The Weekly published articles about how to emphasize your good points and disguise or compensate for your bad ones. (What shape is your face? How do you disguise a pear-shaped body? How do you make narrow shoulders look wider? What is your best colour?) From these articles I grew up learning how to look for my good features and compensate for the ones I didn’t like so much.

Though the lesson was generally intended to apply to your appearance, the regularity of these articles over many years became deeply entrenched in me, and I expect all the other young readers, and it soon became such second nature that it wasn’t hard to apply the principle to my whole life, not just to the way I looked.

I came to understand that the same principles are taught in sport, business, advertising, graphic art, leadership and coaching, and that they apply to every area of successful life management. In graphic art for instance, we are taught to quickly grab the attention of the viewer and convey the message instantly and effectively, and you need to understand the best points of something to be able to do that. In sport, we play our best players and team combination, put them in the right positions for their talents, teach them to compensate for each others flaws, and we understand to “never change a winning team”.

Yesterday, our Genesys Australia team examined our creativity & problem-solving profile. We have assessed many other teams and groups recently, and we decided it was time we “put our money where our mouth is” and looked at our selves.

Looking at our collective strengths and weaknesses, and examining how these fit with our aims, practice and style as an organization, I was reminded of the Women’s Weekly and it’s lesson to know yourself, and I was extremely gratified to have the opportunity to see how we all looked as a team and to see where our strengths and weaknesses lie.

We combined our individual results from the me2 Diagnostic, and examined our team in terms of the dimensions, which include idea generation, personality, motivation and confidence. We charted these on graphs, so that we could clearly see how we all fit together.

Our over-all score is well above average, which is reassuring in a post GFC world, where organizations need to be ready to constantly change and adapt.  As a group, we are high on fluency, idea generation and confidence in sharing ideas. We performed well on achievement and incubating ideas, and can see how we can increase these areas further. Though still in the average range, our lower score was in competiveness, which, after some discussion, we believe is consistent with our strong service-based ethic to help our clients solve their problems. It also reflects that we are both a psychology practice and a very cohesive collaborative team whose members work closely and well together. But we will keep our eye on this – perhaps we need to develop ourselves a bit more in this area and we will introduce some exercises and measures to help us.

The graphs showed a very creative team that has many healthy elements of diversity, and yes, strengths and weaknesses.

By understanding your strengths you can obviously use them to your best advantage, and you do this by minimising or reducing weaknesses and by using, fine-tuning and developing strengths. Many people waste a lot of time concentrating on weaknesses but they are only part of the picture. The key is to play to your strengths which means know your weaknesses and minimise them, but focus on and hone your strengths.

The Australian Women’s Weekly taught me that you can’t play to your strengths unless you know what they are. Yesterday, using the me2 Diagnostic, our team gained a clearer and more focused idea of how to do that. And it gave us a reassuring sense of understanding and self-confidence.

Lynette Jensen

Lynette Jensen is a director and co-founder of Genesys Australia and is committed to helping people achieve work-life balance through good job fit. In addition to contributing to this blog, she also writes regularly for HR Daily Community and Dynamic Business Magazine. Her articles have been re-published in India & the United Kingdom.

Please click on heading to leave a comment. More posts below.

Related Posts:

How to Spot an Original Thinker

NB: We are an independent workplace psychology practice. All views expressed here are our own and are the opinions of Stephen Kohl & his associates, which do not necessarily reflect those of the publisher and developer of GeneSys assessments, Psytech International.

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Why IBM Found Creativity = Business Success

Tuesday, November 1st, 2011

In 2010, IBM published the Global Survey of CEOs 2010 and found that,

“More than rigour, management, discipline, integrity or even vision – successfully navigating an increasingly complex world will require creativity”.

IBM and the more than 1500 CEOs they interviewed from 60 different countries are not alone are in this view. Ernst & Young in their Connecting Innovation to Profit Report, 2010 said,

“The ability to manage, organise, cultivate and nurture creative thinking is directly linked to growth and achievement.”

Why is creativity so important?

Creativity underpins everything we do. It’s hard-wired into our DNA. We can’t help but be creative. Creativity is the ability to solve problems and exploit opportunities. It’s what got us out of the caves and experimenting and discovering. As a species, we have an insatiable desire to make new things, to see what we can do with what we’ve got, to invent and discover, to play with ideas and to see if we can push things to the limit.

Creativity is the raw material of innovation, or in other words, innovation is creativity put into action.

This means that to change and adapt, to invent and develop, to find solutions, to lead well, to get and stay ahead of the pack, to grow and flourish and ultimately to succeed financially, we need creativity. And it follows that the individuals and organisations who can harness their creativity the most will do the best, especially in the post GFC world of constant rapid change.

Creativity applies to everyone.

It’s a myth that only some people are creative, like artists or designers, or that creativity applies to the arts and innovation applies to science or engineering.

We believe and perpetuate these myths to our individual and organisational peril. Everyone left alone on a dessert island would display creativity because they would find that necessity is the mother of invention. They’d look for food, build shelter, cloth themselves in ways they might never have thought of before in order to survive.  They’d use their natural, innate creativity.

Why not get as smart as we can and learn to harness our creativity in business?

During the GFC, in our workplace psychology practice, we noticed that the old ways of doing business, finding staff and operating organisations were fast becoming less relevant. Organisations were “stripping fat”, and cutting back spending on things like recruitment and non-essential training, and looking for new and expedient and cost-effective ways of doing things, and expecting more value for the money they did spend. This attitude seems to have remained.

So we started researching products and theories that would help identify and develop the new imperative to think smart and to change and adapt.

Earlier this year, we discovered that from research at Manchester Business School, a new tool for the workplace had just been developed that identified underlying creativity. If you could assess creativity, and work out in what ways individuals were creative and how they applied their innate creativity, then you could use this information to understand, develop and train individuals and organisations to apply creativity more effectively. Impressively simple idea!

It was what we were looking for, and we knew it was what was so widely needed in the world of business and organisations.

So, we have just launched the new me2 Creativity Diagnostic Tool after a three-month Australian validity study in which we assessed hundreds of people from across the country from many different areas and levels of the workplace. The more we trialled it, the more accuracy we saw, and as a psychology practice, the data really impressed us. Having been used in 41 countries by over 3,500 people so far, it is showing no bias for age, ethnicity or language and the research suggests it is predicting 86% variance for creativity compared to the 3-14% that other tools like Myers-Briggs (MBTI), the Big Five and Hogan Development Survey predict.

The me2 Diagnostic Tool by E-METRIXX is based on years of solid research and development into the psychology of creativity by Dr. Mark Batey and the Psychometrics at Work Research Group from Manchester University. We like it because of the credible research, because it works so well and because it is extremely user friendly.

One of our clients described it the other day as “the sexiest new HR tool” and I think he’s right. It’s very exciting, and also quite humbling, to know that you are introducing a new way of understanding and doing things into the workplace.

Can everyone be creative? You bet!

What has creativity got to do with business? Everything! It underpins innovation, problem-solving, team work and leadership and has unlimited potential to apply to profit as well.

Lynette Jensen

Lynette Jensen is a director and co-founder of Genesys Australia and is committed to helping people achieve work-life balance through good job fit. In addition to contributing to this blog, she also writes regularly for HR Daily Community and Dynamic Business Magazine. Her articles have been re-published in India & the United Kingdom.

Please click on heading to leave a comment. More posts below.

* We were asked to conduct a study on creativity using the me2 Creativity Diagnostic for the forthcoming Creative Innovation 2011 Conference in Melbourne featuring Edward De Bono & sponsored by ANZ, the Financial Review & Business Review Weekly. The report will be published in the conference program and is available on the conference website

NB: We are an independent workplace psychology practice. All views expressed here are our own and are the opinions of Stephen Kohl & his associates, which do not necessarily reflect those of the publisher and developer of GeneSys assessments, Psytech International.

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Posted in Creativity & innovation | No Comments »

Psychopaths at Work

Tuesday, August 30th, 2011

For all our recruitment tests and practices in HR, the problem of psychopaths in the workplace remains a problem that’s hard to solve.

Everyone has worked with a psychopath. I’m a lay-person, so I use the term in it’s popular sense, but I’m on their case. Sometimes they are the obvious bullies in the office, sometimes they are your boss, and sometimes they are someone not apparently in charge, but who has everyone running around after them and who manipulates and wreaks havoc on the whole group by subtle disempowerment.

I’ve known a few. The first one was my boss, and he nearly destroyed my health and my career.

Sometimes, psychopaths are so effective at getting their way and destroying everyone around them, that the only way you can detect them is by noticing the destruction around them. Like a Black Hole in the universe, which you can only detect from the glow around it as light gets sucked in, you can tell if there’s an office psychopath around because everything in the office will be going wrong somehow: team spirit will be low, team work and cooperation will have disintegrated, group optimism and company or department vision will have disappeared, everyone will be tense and guarded and resentful, and nobody will really know why. And most likely, the psychopath will be undetected, and worse, they might be the only person that everyone thinks they can trust.

It’s scary.

I’ve been reading the website of one of the more recent psychopaths in my life. Having totally destroyed the morale of the people he worked with, having repeatedly covered up monthly losses by making charismatic and extravagant promises to the people above him and blaming other people, having (in this day and age!) indulged in outrageous and blatant sexist, harassing and upsetting behaviour with his junior staff, having offended clients with his use of bad language and other inappropriate and crass behaviours, he is now the CEO of a company.

I can see how he got there. He got there through deceit, using other people and destroying lives, reputations and health.

His website looks pretty good. In fact, I recognize some of my own words and ideas there. According to his bio, at the company where he used to work, and where he was finally let go because they just couldn’t afford the losses he kept making, he now claims he made huge profits. Not only that, but the bio is misleadingly worded to give the impression he was much higher in the organization than he actually was. From the bio, you get the impression this guy was actually in charge of the whole Australasian operation. You’d think his former employer would make him change it. The website shows he’s even got some of his ex-victims working for him. How does he get away with it? Because it’s the way psychopaths work, that’s how.

Psychopaths have a way of charming people. Psychopaths tell us what they think we want to hear. Psychopaths have a sense of over-entitlement. They manipulate us and destroy our reputations behind our backs. They divide and rule.

The most powerful weapon a psychopath has though, is their total lack of shame, and this is what makes them different from everyone else. The rest of us care what other people think of us, most of us want to genuinely cooperate, and most of us would be embarrassed if we behaved outrageously in public. Not the psychopath. Because of this, they are able to lie and cheat to great effect.

In tandem with their lack of shame is their other secret weapon: they are really great actors. Though they have no remorse, they can pretend. They are very good at mimicking normal (and even empathetic) human behaviour. They don’t feel it, but they copy it. They are very convincing and can be very charming. While if you stand up to a psychopath they’ll eventually yell, scream and in extreme cases even kill you, they don’t usually need to because they’re so adept at manipulating through charming deceit.

The psych tests we apply in HR to job candidates and staff development are not clinical tools and should not be. They won’t pick up a psychopath. In any event, psychopathy, or sociopathy as it’s now called, is a Personality Disorder, not a mental illness as such, and is extremely hard to detect even in a clinical setting (they’re charming right, and they even know what a clinician wants to hear).

If you gave an Emotional Intelligence test to a psychopath, they’d probably blitz it. Some psychologists even argue that giving EI information to a psychopath is like giving them a loaded gun. It gives them more ammunition to use against the rest of us by teaching them how to be even more charming and apparently agreeable.

So what can you do about an office psychopath? Start to look for the human and organizational fall-out around them. And don’t kid yourself that you are immune to their charm and stories.

The only way to slay a psychopath is with rationality. Insist on evidence and measurable outcomes, not their promises and stories. If everything seems to be awry in your team, and you don’t know why, then you’ve most likely got a psychopath in your midst.

Lynette Jensen

Lynette Jensen is a director and co-founder of Genesys Australia and is committed to helping people achieve work-life balance through good job fit. In addition to contributing to this blog, she also writes regularly for HR Daily Community and Dynamic Business Magazine. Her articles have been re-published in India & the United Kingdom.

Please click on heading to leave a comment. More posts below.

* This is a personal view and does not necessarily represent the opinion, belief or policy of the company. This is a lay-person’s view and the example in this post should not be construed to be a real person, and examples of behaviour cited here are illustrations of typical behaviour patterns. More posts below.

Related posts:

Murder in the Village: Team-work & Community

Leadership & Good Manners

NB: We are an independent workplace psychology practice. All views expressed here are our own and are the opinions of Stephen Kohl & his associates, which do not necessarily reflect those of the publisher and developer of GeneSys assessments, Psytech International.

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Posted in Workplace Psychopaths | 1 Comment »

More Cheating on Psych Tests

Saturday, June 11th, 2011

There has been an interesting discussion lately on a Psychometrics Linked In Group. The discussion was begun by Prue Laurence, Director at Psylutions, a workplace psychology consultancy in Melbourne where they are currently conducting a survey about cheating in workplace psychometric tests and people’s attitudes to psych testing.

Cheating on psych tests is a subject that comes up a lot, and I have fairly recently written about it myself.

In general, I would say that there’s very little point in even attempting to cheat, not because I make a moral judgement, but because potential employees just don’t know what an employer might be looking for. There’s a common perception that every employer is looking for extravert personalities, and put simply, that’s just wrong. There’s also a perception that extraverts are somehow “better” than introverts and that’s just silly. (For an explanation, please read my previous post, link above).

But Prue’s call for subjects to do her survey has engendered a discussion that has begun to develop the idea of cheating in a much deeper way, and to consider the phenomenon of psych tests and the way they can be used and abused from a different perspective.

One of the commenters, a UK Director of a Human Resources and Business consultancy, related the story of a group of young graduates gathering together to complete online unsupervised ability tests for their friends. He says, “…There seems to be no shame in this (they see it) as a fair way of outwitting the tedious, repetitious and time-consuming automated selection processes so many businesses put in the way of bright graduates applying for jobs.”

I think this is really sad. Psychometric tests, or any other form of employee selection should never be used to get in the way of anyone applying for jobs, or getting them. All our staff selection processes, including psych tests, should be used to get the clearest picture possible of not only who will be the best person for the job, but also whether the job is the best fit for the applicant. It’s a two-way street, and all our selection processes should be applied well, carefully and humanely, in order to achieve the best decision possible, and the best outcome for everyone.

The idea of a conveyor belt, one-size-fits-all, psychometric testing (most especially ability testing!) also really concerns me. You would hope that ability tests would be carefully conducted, and the idea that we are becoming a society where we are so concerned with churning through processes for expedience, rather than doing things well and carefully, is frankly repugnant. If tests are conducted coldly and blithely, then can we be surprised that people might treat them blithely? Psych tests most certainly can be used for screening, but that doesn’t mean we should forget that candidates are people, or that we should do it cruelly, coldly, or cynically.

But another comment in the discussion is even more concerning. The Director of a Leadership and Human Resources and Development consultancy in the USA says, “Have you ever applied for a job online lately? … No feedback, no contact, no personal touch … No real opportunity to tell your story…”.

Further, he says that he has built and used tests for many years, but finds himself “…embarrassed by what passes for professional practice these days” And tellingly, he says, “ We say people are our most valuable resource but then treat them like cattle being led to the slaughter.”

I say it’s a call to arms! It doesn’t have to be this way, and shouldn’t be.

All of us who are involved in Human Resources, staff selection and development, recruiting, and test development and delivery need to be constantly aware that we are in the business of dealing with people’s lives. If we don’t treat people well and fairly, then we can’t expect them to treat our processes well and fairly.

You don’t need to cheat on psych tests. Lets make sure we deliver psych tests and our other processes so well, that we’re not cheating on candidates.

For all of us, our job and work life is one of the most important things we have in life. We need to keep remembering that.

Lynette Jensen

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* This is a personal view and does not necessarily represent the opinion, belief or policy of the company. More posts below.

 

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Inspired Workplaces: Sydney Trapeze School

Tuesday, April 26th, 2011

Since writing recently about the oyster farmers of the Manning River and their magnificent workplace, I’ve been thinking about other equally inspiring workplaces.

Our launch was held at Sydney Trapeze School a number of years ago, with a metaphorical wish to help our clients “fly”, and though on the surface, a trapeze school seems very different from a workplace psychology practice, we have had a close psychological connection to the school and have used it as a source of inspiration since we began.

Sydney Trapeze School operates from an historical, edgy and extremely stylish old factory, which still retains its enormous original gantry crane, in the grungy inner-city suburb of St Peters in Sydney. In an industrial and old working class suburb, STS is located in an old factory complex next to the train tracks, where these days a number of adventure and arts enterprises share the space with operating factories, workshops and industrial businesses.

The environment of Sydney Trapeze School is the first thing that makes it special, and inspirational. It is huge, lofty, and cathedral-like, and of course the flying trapeze rig and other circus apparatus makes it seem exotic and colourful. The juxtaposition of colourful circus paraphernalia with the industrial atmosphere of the original building makes you feel as though you are somewhere special and enthralling.

But in addition to the physical impact of STS, there is much more that makes it a very special place. Sydney Trapeze School was begun nearly three years ago by twin brothers Frank and Rob Taylor, whose enduring laid-back and casually friendly demeanour belies the inspiration and drive that must have been required to bring their dream to fruition, and make it the successful operation it is.

Flying Trapeze is a growing sport, recreation and fitness activity, because it combines a number of physical and mental challenges, including gymnastic skill, careful timing, tenacity, trust, teamwork, and personal mental and physical courage. Learning to fly on the flying trapeze is the kind of activity that helps people realise and generalise skills that are needed for all other aspects of a successful life. Because these skills, especially over-coming personal challenges and fears, are extremely relevant to the workplace, Sydney Trapeze School offers corporate workshops to work teams and organisations among its services.

At the end of every term, Sydney Trapeze School stages a performance, which showcases its students’ hard work. At the most recent show, based on a pirate theme, the completion of a huge mural was also celebrated. Local street artists, Tom McDonald and Peter Lloyd Jones were commissioned to paint a mural along almost the entire length of one wall, and the project took a year to complete.

With a teaching staff now of over a dozen, students from across Sydney, a secondary out-door rig for use in summer, and an Australia-wide reputation, the Taylor brothers have developed their business from the ground up into an impressively successful operation which still retains the friendly and inclusive atmosphere it began with.

It’s success and continuing growth is a testament to what can happen when you have clear vision, faith and tenacity.

Lynette Jensen

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* This is a personal view and does not necessarily represent the opinion, belief or policy of the company. More posts below.

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Cheating on Psych Tests

Monday, February 7th, 2011

 

I’m getting a bit sick of hearing people talking about cheating on psych tests. All over the internet, from chat rooms to websites to blogs and legitimate news and journal articles, people are sharing stories about how they have “cleverly” worked out that they can cheat on personality tests.

Well “duh”! Most people these days have a pretty good general idea of pop psychology, and what it means in general to be an “extrovert” and an “introvert”. Is there anyone out there who doesn’t think an extrovert is an outgoing person, and an introvert is a shy person who likes to keep to themselves?

Now, armed with this basic knowledge, you could go into a psych test, and pretend to be one or the other. I’m sure that would be pretty easy for most people. You wouldn’t need much imagination to pull it off, I wouldn’t have thought.

But here’s the thing: even if you cheated in a personality test, how would you know what sort person an employer was looking for? The assumption of most of these “clever cheaters” is that an extrovert is more desirable than an introvert. This is just simply wrong. A high extrovert score or a high introvert score on any psychometric test (or magazine quiz even!) is simply an indication of a certain personality tendency and style, and neither is “good” or “bad”.

Why assume, for instance, that an extreme introvert would be harder to work with than an extreme extrovert? Is it harder to work with someone who is shy and can’t make eye contact, than with someone who wants to dance on the desks and be the centre of attention and keeps wanting to talk to you all the time and won’t let you get on with your own work? Both extremities would be problematic in most circumstances, and one or the other would be most suitable in very rare and specific circumstances. A high extrovert might (but not necessarily) make a good stand-up comedian, for example, but a high introvert might be better as a light-house keeper.

It’s horses for courses, and if you were taking a personality test as part of a job application process, you wouldn’t know what kind of person was ideal for the role. Only the prospective employer would know what was needed and what they were looking for, just like an actor doesn’t know exactly what a film-director has in mind for a character. Just because it’s a sales job for instance, it doesn’t mean they’d be looking for an extrovert (think of travelling sales-people with long hours alone on the road), and do we necessarily want managers who are so caught up in their own confidence and ego that they don’t  pay attention to their team, or their organization?

This is only scratching the surface. I’ve only used obvious and extreme examples. There are myriad versions of personality styles made up of combinations of all sorts of qualities (you can be a high extrovert, for example, and yet be insecure, and one of the most popular people I know is very shy and not very talkative, and yet inspires great confidence in people).

So, I’d like to say to all those incredibly imaginative people who think they know how to cheat in psych tests:

1.No one kind of personality is “better” than another.

2.Don’t assume you know what a prospective employer is looking for.

3.If you want to do well in a Personality Test, do what all psychometric publishers tell you to do and be yourself.

4.Personality Tests are designed to give you and your employer more insight, so the more straightforward you are, the more you will know about yourself and how you fit into and operate as part of the group.

5.If you want to do well in an Ability Test brush up on your thinking skills, get plenty of sleep the night before, and be on time so you don’t get anxious.

You could cheat in an interview too, by pretending to be someone you are not, or you could falsify your resume. It’s all possible. But if any of this subterfuge managed to get you a job in the short-term, I’ll bet you wouldn’t keep it long, because YOU wouldn’t be the person they were looking for, and either you, or your new employer would get tired fairly quickly. So you could save yourself and everyone else time by being honest all along.

And as post-script, most psych tests have questions built-in to identify cheating, so really you are more likely to cheat yourself!

Lynette Jensen

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* This is a personal view and does not necessarily represent the opinion, belief or policy of the company. More posts below.

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Psychometric Juggernaut: SHL & Previsor Merge

Tuesday, January 18th, 2011

 

In the last few days, it’s been announced that two of the world’s well-known psychometric publishers, SHL and Previsor, have merged. Many people in the psych test world have been asking what this merger will mean for the market.

Previsor is a USA based psych assessment publisher and SHL is UK based. In Australia, SHL has a high profile, and provides assessments for a substantial part of the Australian market, particularly the mass testing kind that is used by department stores and fast-food chains. Previsor, on the other hand, seems to have a much smaller market share in Australia, which is possibly related to Australia’s general reluctance to accept many things American.*

I am by no means a business or financial analyst, but I imagine that the effect of this merger on the Australian scene will be very minimal, since Previsor will take on the SHL name, and I suppose that there will be very little change in the way SHL assessment is presented and provided. World-wide, it will mean that SHL will now have a much greater exposure in America, but I don’t imagine that SHL will change it’s presentation or tests significantly or at all, under the influence of a Previsor relationship.

While both SHL & Previsor should benefit from an increased profile, they will also be subject to the increasing bureaucratic challenges that arise from large, juggernaut-like companies the world over.

It’s my understanding that both these testing systems, like nearly all others in the world, are offered primarily online. Their attraction to clients seems to have been that they have been seen to be quick and easy, and that, because they appear to offer to take care of the whole process, there is little for adminstrators of the tests to have to do. This style of testing suits some organisations very well, and though it can lack flexibility and control of the process, and  the data, it is a price they seem happy to pay for perceived simplicity. However, it can also result in a mass testing situation in which very little discernment is involved.

Announcing the SHL/PreVisor merger and the effect it will have on the American market on his blog  http://www.bersin.com/blog/post/2011/01/SHL-and-Previsor-Merge–New-Global-Leader-in-the-Assessment-Market.aspx, Josh Bersin from Bersin & Associates wrote as part of his assessment of the current psychometric situation, ” …only 25% of companies have any well defined job competencies for each particular role. This means they are buying ‘off the shelf’ assessments for many positions where they have not necessarily tailored the assessment for the competencies they need.”

It seems to me that any proliferation of huge psychometric companies, with a “one-size-fits-all” range of tests and assessments, combined with a possible tendency for large organisations to mass test large numbers with “off the shelf” assessments, will add to the concern that Mr Bersin expresses.

It is well-known in Australia that in our own organisation our preference using GeneSys is for a more boutique or bespoke-style psych assessment approach, where the range of tests chosen are carefully tailored, with expert advise from Organisational Psychologists, to the particular needs of the organisation and the roles they need to fill or develop. GeneSys’ UK-based publisher, Psytech International has a locally based philosophy (Global Leaders in Local Assessment Solutions) that sees psychometric assessment delivered around the world by carefully chosen distributors who are local, and who have an intimate knowledge of, and a strong relationship with, their local business and organisational environments. Its a model we are proud of, and believe is probably fairly unique, but more importantly it ensures a very sound, reliable and objective assessment process.

We wish SHL & Previsor very well with the merger. Apart from a flurry of interest by other psychometric publishers and providers however, I see very little change for the world of psychometric testing in the short term, and am hopeful that in the long-term it won’t lead to a reduction of flexibility, control and individual relevance for psychometric users across the world.

* The Simpsons, Coca-Cola and some areas of youth culture are obvious exceptions

Lynette Jensen

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* This is a personal view and does not necessarily represent the opinion, belief or policy of the company. More posts below.

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