Selecting the Right Candidate
Posted: Thu Jan 23, 2025 9:00 am
Using psychometrics for personnel selection can be quite a contentious subject. Speaking with my father, he remembers the days when it was commonplace for someone to use "working too hard" as an answer to "what are your areas of weakness?" in an interview. These days, that doesn't work. Organisations need ways to select the top talented individuals from an ever growing pool of candidates.
These days there are a plethora of ways to selecting candidates; situational judgement ukraine phone number library tests, aptitude (numerical and verbal) tests, tests of inductive reasoning, matrices tests, personality tests etc. Many organisations already use assessments, the most well known being the MBTI which is based on Carl Jung's theories on personality.
All of these methods are down to years, even decades, of research and application and most are scientifically validated extensively.
The phrase "selecting the best" doesn't, however, mean selecting the ultimate candidate. End of the day, we are all different and suited for different positions. You wouldn't hire an overly extroverted and sociable individual to work in a position where they will be required to work on their own for long periods of time. Or someone who may lack attention to detail to work as an air traffic controller!
Very crude examples indeed and very much focussed on the personality side of assessment, but the message is clear, these tests are cruicial when it comes to hiring the right person for a job. In the above example, we can see that personality characteristics affect whether a candidate will have a natural tendency towards competencies that are key for success in the role.
A bad hire can have quite an effect. Not only does it cost thousands to recruit, train and onboard the candidate, it can also affect productivity, morale, client relations, not to mention time, money and the additional costs of recruiting and training another candidate. In terms of facts and figures, 27% in both the UK and the US have reported that a bad hire has cost their organisation around £50,000 and $50,000 respectively (source: CareerBuilder).
These days there are a plethora of ways to selecting candidates; situational judgement ukraine phone number library tests, aptitude (numerical and verbal) tests, tests of inductive reasoning, matrices tests, personality tests etc. Many organisations already use assessments, the most well known being the MBTI which is based on Carl Jung's theories on personality.
All of these methods are down to years, even decades, of research and application and most are scientifically validated extensively.
The phrase "selecting the best" doesn't, however, mean selecting the ultimate candidate. End of the day, we are all different and suited for different positions. You wouldn't hire an overly extroverted and sociable individual to work in a position where they will be required to work on their own for long periods of time. Or someone who may lack attention to detail to work as an air traffic controller!
Very crude examples indeed and very much focussed on the personality side of assessment, but the message is clear, these tests are cruicial when it comes to hiring the right person for a job. In the above example, we can see that personality characteristics affect whether a candidate will have a natural tendency towards competencies that are key for success in the role.
A bad hire can have quite an effect. Not only does it cost thousands to recruit, train and onboard the candidate, it can also affect productivity, morale, client relations, not to mention time, money and the additional costs of recruiting and training another candidate. In terms of facts and figures, 27% in both the UK and the US have reported that a bad hire has cost their organisation around £50,000 and $50,000 respectively (source: CareerBuilder).