Today most people see these instruments for what they are – amazingly helpful ways of understanding our preferred ways of behaving, of reasoning, our values and personal style. There is nothing mysterious about any of them. Even to us hardened psychologists, it is still amazing that such relatively brief questionnaires can tell us so much about ourselves. So, there is nothing to fear and everything to be gained. Despite such devices as lie scales, or as some would say, ‘motivational distortion’ measures, of course one can still ‘cheat’, but you have to wonder who you are cheating.
The individual takes a variety of these exercises, either in the material presented before the day – so as to ensure more time is available on the day for talking in more depth – or during the course of the day itself.
The kinds of areas they are designed to explore would include:
- Reasoning, whether verbal, numerical or abstract
- Creative or lateral thinking
- Personality
- Motivation
- Decision making style
- Psychological type
- Interpersonal style
The particular battery of instruments any one person will take is varied according to the particular job or to an individual’s particular needs.
Each of the exercises is explained in advance. There are no tricks to them; nor are they mysterious or threatening. They are intended to generate a wide diversity of behaviours so that, as far as possible, the judgments made during the course of the assessment have a diversity and richness of evidence to support them.
The key focus of our work is to provide individual psychological assessments as part of a continuing relationship with a client where we help to develop the “people” side of their business. A candidate is assessed in relation to a well-defined, well understood client company by a business psychologist who has an appreciation of where existing and future problems and opportunities within the company might lie.
The assessment is a help to both the client company and the candidate when selecting or promoting people. It is some extra guarantee that the match, and therefore the probability of success, is being judged by experienced and professional business psychologists who take an objective view from both the client’s and the candidate’s standpoint. Importantly, from a recruitment perspective, it “signals” to the person being assessed the client company’s concern to do a professional job of selecting, developing and retaining its people.
No candidate can be a perfect fit to a job and bring an absolute certainty of succeeding. Our “process” is geared to helping ensure attention is paid, and action is taken, in the areas that are critical to that chosen candidate succeeding. Thus we address the issue of successful integration into the company – as well as effective selection.