Shyamal Majumdar: Measuring the mind

THE HUMAN FACTOR

They were first used to test the mental toughness of American soldiers during World War I.

Now psychometric tests are being increasingly used by corporations all over the world to gauge a candidate's personality traits to minimise costly misjudgements about new employees.

A recent study concluded that 87 per cent of employers worldwide use these tests to select their employees.

Indian companies are catching up with this global trend for recruitment of entry-level candidates, promotion to middle-management levels and for retraining.

For instance, with increasing demand from clients and the pressure to cut down on attrition costs, a majority of Indian IT-enabled services like Wipro Spectramind have started using psychometric tests for recruiting call centre professionals.

Reason: the nature of the job is repetitive, the hours are odd and the scope for imagination is limited.

These tests "" essentially a tool for measuring the mind "" help companies to recruit certain types of people whose personality traits (ability to listen and handle rejections, for instance) match the job profile.

Apart from ensuring the right personality fit, call centres, which have to handle a large number of candidates, find the cost of screening candidates much cheaper than the conventional methods.

According to some estimates, the cost to company per candidate screening through a psychometric test like Thomas Profiling is between Rs 200 and Rs 300 and the test is considered to be 85 per cent accurate.

At the other end of the spectrum are companies like Infosys, which find such tests useful for retraining purposes since they give an insight into the candidate's motivation levels and skill sets.

LG uses this rigorous statistical analysis for evaluation of management and leadership skills.

Indian Oil, UB, Arvind Mills and Maruti are among a rapidly growing number of companies that believe that such tests assist considerably in providing an accurate assessment of whether an individual is able to do the required job and whether the person's character is suited to the work.

There are three broad categories of psychometric tools: ability tests, interest inventories and personality questions.

While ability tests measure a person's abilities and how he performs when solving problems, interest inventories are used to help identify the area of work a person is passionate about and to compare it with occupations that he would most likely enjoy.

Personality questions reveal a person's disposition to act or behave in a certain way.

The most commonly used test is the one called Myers-Briggs. It is used to find out more about the direction your career is taking.

The test identifies 16 different personality types, based on Swiss psychologist Carl Jung's theory that we are born with a predisposition of one specific type of personality.

This is gauged from questions about the preferred ways of behaving. Individuals can be thinking or feeling, judging or perceiving, introvert or extrovert.

Tests to select candidates look at particular personality traits related to these 16 types and attempt to quantify how much an individual has them.

But HR experts say that for psychometric tests to be successful, it is important to remember that they are measuring instruments - not qualification examinations "" and there are no right or wrong answers. Also, for choosing the most appropriate tool, companies must evaluate purpose against design: look at what the psychometric tool is designed to measure or predict, and stack it against what it's being used for.

Analysts who are against psychometric testing as a tool to screen people, say people are not robots whose behaviour pattern can be judged by an impersonal assessment.

Also, a psychological mumbo-jumbo can never be an alternative to face-to-face interviews. Good psychometric practitioners recognise this and feel that having tested a person, it is critical to give face-to-face feedback and use all the data obtained as an agenda for further probing.

Companies using psychometric tests, however, say personality questionnaires reveal a person's disposition to act or behave in a certain way and are remarkably powerful in understanding career motivators, working styles and individual and team organisation.

As for the inaccuracy of such tests, they say psychometric tests are merely measuring instruments and all measuring instruments are open to error. If they are not perfect, neither are interviews nor other kinds of screening of applicants.

More importantly, they minimise the subjective element in a test. Well designed and constructed psychometric tests give fairly repeatable results, which is not the case in interviews.