Aptitude Testing for Recruitment
Good employees make a good business. As an entrepreneur, you more than likely want to do absolutely everything yourself but as the business starts to grow, it's important to bring in new staff. It's even more important to bring in the right new staff!
How do you ensure that the employees you bring into your budding business, have the right intentions? How can you check they have the right attitude, interest and passion?
This is where aptitude testing can help. A quick Google search brings up thousands of results, and plenty of them include recruiting companies who offer aptitude testing in their approach, for example Peoplogica, Acumen Human Capital, and VEQ. Using these tests is one way to help ensure that your workplace is an environment where all staff 'click', have similar personality traits and the desired work ethic. Although these tests won't 100% guarantee against miss-hiring, they can reduce the risk.
Aptitude tests are intended to assess logical reasoning and/or thinking performance. They are normally multiple choice questions, and directed under exam conditions. Questions usually fall into one of the below categories:
- Verbal ability
- Numeric ability
- Abstract reasoning
- Spatial ability
- Mechanical reasoning
- Fault diagnosis
- Data checking
- Work sample
These obviously differ depending on the industry the test is applied to.
Results are interpreted using two diverse methods, the first, Criterion-Referenced Interpretation, indicates the amount of skill or knowledge in a particular subject area and is not used for comparison, but solely the competency level of the applicant in a specific area.
Norm-Referenced test scores compare the applicants' performance with the performance of the 'norm group' in that subject area. This needs to be done carefully as the comparison must be specific to show the true score of the applicant. Best to leave it up to the professionals!
To learn more about aptitude testing, Psychometric Success is very insightful, as are the above linked companies.
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