Pre Employment Tests
Whether interviewing for a sales clerk post or an executive-level position for a Fortune 500 company, job seekers in today's glutted labor market should prepare for a nostalgic return to a teenage rite of passage: an assessment test.
Pre-employment psychometric testing - which purports to measure everything from a candidate's aptitude for a specific job to his or her honesty and ability to manage anger - is on the upswing, test consultants, researchers and company representatives report. Long a mainstay in the United Kingdom - where several of the United States' largest testing companies got their start - a significant ratio of U.S. companies now administer some sort of preemployment test, according to HR and employment surveys.
More companies administer pre-employment screening to assess a job candidate's aptitude, honesty and even personality. Factors as varied as growing concerns over workplace security and the need for a convenient and inexpensive way to winnow today's deep candidate pool have fueled the tests' popularity.
"We've definitely seen a steady increase in their use in the past 20 years," said Edward Hoffman, a clinical psychologist and author of ACE THE CORPORATE PERSONALITY TEST and PSYCHOLOGICAL TESTING AT WORK.
A pre-employment test can be as different as the job for which it is being administered. For sales clerk positions, it may consist of a 20-minute multiple choice, pen-and-pencil test that gauges candidates' honesty, personality and other traits valued in retail and customer service roles.
For a managerial or executive level post, the evaluation can consume an entire day. It may include an in-depth personal interview with a psychologist, cognitive tests similar to college or professional school entrance exams, a "personality inventory" questionnaire, and a workplace simulation - observed and evaluated by psychologists - in which candidates assume roles they will be expected to fill if hired.
While employers are prohibited from asking questions that violate anti-discrimination laws-including queries related to race, ethnicity, sexual orientation or religious beliefs - legislators and courts have given companies wide berth in how they assess prospective employers, including the use of such tests. And while candidates always have the option of declining to participate in an assessment, doing so usually eliminates them from further consideration, experts said.
A major impetus fueling pre-employment testing is companies' growing concerns about workplace security, integrity and crime. An analysis of the 1.8 million background checks conducted by an international human resources services company that conducts pre-employment tests and background checks, found that almost one-quarter of applicants misrepresented their employment or educational records, 13 percent wouldn't be rehired by a previous employer and 6 percent had recent criminal records.
Can candidates prepare for a psychometric test? Yes and no, experts said.
Individuals can prepare themselves for what to expect and practice the sort of questions you are likely to encounter, which generally boosts results because candidates are more confident with materials with which they are comfortable.
Whether candidates should seek to present themselves in a more favorable light-known as "social desirability" in psychological parlance-is open for debate. All professionally developed psychological tests have "lie scales" designed to identify dishonest answers. (Example: "I have never hurt anyone's feelings.") Get tripped up by a test's "lie scale" and your score suffers.
"Answered honestly, these tests are good predictors of job performance, but the question then becomes, 'what constitutes answering honestly?' " said Rick Frei, a Philadelphia-based organizational psychologist who has researched such tests' ability to predict job performance. "There are some questions that, if answered honestly, would raise serious questions about a candidate's intelligence or political savvy, which are traits that are also obviously important in the workplace."
Most experts, however, counsel test takers that honesty is indeed the best policy. Being honest protects you from getting caught by the "lie scale" and ensures you don't end up in a job for which you're ill-suited and at which you'll likely be unhappy or unsuccessful.
Other tips experts offered include:
- Practice, but don't go overboard.
- Find a few books or Internet sites devoted to the topic.
- Learn as much as you can in advance about the job, hiring company and structure and content of the test. The best preparation is to have an understanding of what the job entails, because for all their sophistication, these tests are "fake-able" at some level, experts said. If a job candidate understands the job and the qualities the ideal candidate is expected to have, they can better inject those qualities into their answers.
- Arrive well rested.
- Clear your mind.
