Psychometric testing is primarily used to help gain insight into the personality and psyche of an individual. This can be particularly helpful when it comes to career and business decisions.

A lot of early psychometric work focused on trying to measure intelligence, but nowadays it is more often used to gauge personality, attitudes, beliefs and achievement potential.

On one level, psychometric testing can give an individual an insight into the types of careers and roles for which they might be best suited, taking into account their interests and traits. However, the tests can also be very useful in the recruitment process, helping an organisation to find the best candidate for a position based on how they will fit in to the role and how they are likely to deal with the existing team.

For the purposes of recruitment, psychometric testing gives the employer an overview of a candidate’s personality and work style which has a basis in science, rather than simply having to rely on their own judgement. Since every candidate can be tested in the same way, this makes the process much fairer on all concerned.

Within an employment setting, there are three main types of psychometric tests:

Ability Tests
These tests require the candidate to perform a task to the best of their ability. They are then judged on how well they have executed the task. These types of tests are sometimes divided into tests of achievement, where the candidate is judged solely on what they have achieved within the task, and tests of aptitude, which are designed to assess the candidate’s potential ability to perform a task. Ability tests may assess general mental abilities, such as verbal or numerical reasoning, or they may assess more specific job-related abilities, such as clerical aptitude.

Personality Questionnaires
There are no right or wrong answers in a personality questionnaire. Instead, these are designed to give an overview of an individual’s personality, assessing how they might usually behave, think and feel in certain situations. A personality questionnaire will often give a number of different scores, detailing various dimensions of the personality. These scores are then combined to help construct a personality profile for the individual. 

Interests, Motivation and Attitude Tests
These are similar to personality questionnaires in many ways, but instead of giving a personality profile they are designed to assess what a person finds particularly interesting or important. For example, a test relating to interests can be particularly useful in helping an individual to identify potential careers.

Used correctly by a qualified psychologist, psychometric tests can be an invaluable tool for both career planning and recruitment.