HR & Psychometrics

HR – Psychos?

 

I was recently asked if I knew of any place someone could apply to do psychometric testing and receive professional evaluation. The person asking wanted to register as a qualified assessor. He had trained as an assessor and was looking for some professional work in the line of his new qualification. This was of great interest to me because several other people I know had taken the trouble to get certification in various psychometric and specialized testing. The field of professional assessors is growing. All the qualifications of the profession so far, however, are from outside the country.

 

Psychometrics is a growing specialism in the area of Human Resources and is likely to expand under recruitment & selection, counseling and career development. Such testing provides some tangible evidence of the candidates' personality and competence apart from their educational qualifications. The tests help human resources practitioners improve their predictive index of employee performance and behavior and makes managing people less instinctive and more definitive.

 

My interest in the subject began when I was in high school reading psychology magazines my father read while he was in college. I later faced my first psycho when I was interviewed as a training consultant some 15 years ago. I do not know what they were looking for, but I must have come out with the right profile because I was hired. I later came to find out that I was the subject of a "Myers Briggs". Myers Briggs is one of the more famous of the many tests available that can be interpreted using a structured response matrix.

 

It is of concern, though, that many of the tests are set in foreign cultures and therefore a significant level of candidate education and exposure is required to correctly interpret the questions used to come up with a credible assessment. For example if a test question reads "what do you normally do when it starts to snow". Such a question assumes that the person under assessment knows about snow or experiences snowy conditions routinely. A person from Kenya may have difficulty guessing the right answer to the question if they have never seen or experienced snow which, in Kenya, is not abnormal. Assessment tests should always be culturalized so that candidates do not have to struggle to find responses they can identify with.

 

Being an entrepreneur of sorts, I would encourage Kenyans to develop their own tests designed to reveal traits about candidates that they would find useful on the job. For the field to become respected in Kenya, it is not enough that we import the tests, but that we actually develop tests that work for us in our environment. This means that human resources practitioners should not only use the tests but become familiar with how to create them on the job. This does not mean that HR managers must now become psychologists as well, though that is not a bad thing, but they must begin to add value to the organizations they manage by developing tools the organization can use to assess and develop the caliber and competence of the people the business needs. For example company A and company B need marketers, but qualifications are insufficient to identify the type of marketer that will thrive or do well in either company. This is where the tools come in handy.

 

There is a related development to Psychometric testing which I find extremely useful, I call it "Perception Testing". Perception testing does not depend on deep psychology, yet in my experience, provides enough feedback from the candidate to identify their "perceived" biases. In other words this kind of testing works on the evaluation of what the candidate thinks of himself or herself. It is not as technical as psychometric testing and it may be claimed that it is more error prone. Still, it does give a quantitative evaluation of a qualitative trait. Its main strength is that it uses information supplied by the candidate, just like the psychometric test.

 

The whole field of psychometric testing should not be feared it is no more complex than any of the issues covered by human resources managers in corporate organizations. Managing people is by far the most complicated thing I know. As Kenya moves forward and there is little time and funds to waste on ill fitting inappropriate personnel, corporate organizations will become more and more willing to invest in Psychometric, Perception and any other testing that will shorten the route, time and cost businesses incur between employee selection and performance. The HR Psycho is here to stay!

 

Allan Bukusi, 27 March 2008