Psychometric Profiling

Psychometric Profiling is used to help employers make effective decisions on their employees or the people they want to employ. It is now very common for employers to conduct a psychometric profiling pre-interview, as part of the interview day, or as part of an employee appraisal process.

Project Resource works closely with a respected leader in the field of Psychometric Assessment.  We suggest to all employers, that psychometric profiling is a very useful additional tool to aid in your recruitment and retention procedures. We are delighted to be able to offer employers the ability to conduct a Psychometric Assessment here.

Psychometric Assessment for Employers/Interviewers

Psychometric assessment/profiling is now a fundamental part of recruitment and every day more employers throughout the world are integrating such assessment, as part of their recruitment process, so they get the right person for the job.

Psychometric assessment/profiling is useful for the employer, as it highlights the interviewees permanent, transient, potential and inactive traits; guidelines to managing them, service skills, technical ability, relationships and their team adaptability. Project Resource is now offering you the chance to create your own behavioural profiles online for your interviewees.

Introduction to Psychometric Analysis

There are many forms of personality/psychometric analysis. Project Resource recommends the internationally recognised DISC version.

A DISC psychometric profile can be an excellent addition to your recruitment process, you will get a better understanding about what makes the job seeker tick and how they behave. The assessment concentrates on describing how different individuals behave in a work setting.

The DISC personality profile

The DISC Profile is a personality testing technique that uses a simple questionnaire as a basis for revealing insights into a person's behaviour. Recruiters around the world have been using this personality test technique for decades, but now myDISCprofile gives you the chance to perform a fast and useful psychometric test.

A DISC personality profile can help you explore many different features of the jobseekers' personal style, including approach to home and work life, communication style, motivation, specific strengths, and a lot more.

Types of psychometric and personality tests

There are many ways of evaluating an individual's skills or approach, and predicting their likely behaviour from the results. At one end of the scale there are fairly simple personality tests designed to evaluate specific skills and abilities, such as an examination or driving test. At the other end of the scale lie batteries of psychometric tests, designed to build as complete a picture of a person's style and approach, in general terms, as possible. DISC lies somewhere in the middle of this spectrum.

While it isn't a full 'personality test' in the strict technical sense, it provides an insight into an individual style that is more than adequate to predict the likely trends of their behaviour in the future. It does this by evaluating four key factors in an individual style, rather than the sixteen or more that are often seen in full personality tests (for example, DISC makes no attempt to measure such factors as intelligence).

This confers the advantage of greater accessibility: while a full test battery will often contain literally hundreds of questions, and take hours to complete, a DISC personality profile questionnaire contains only twenty-four questions, and can be usually be performed in fifteen minutes or less. This also provides advantages in the area of interpretation; while the interpretation of results from a full test remains in the province of experts, DISC results are sufficiently well-defined that their interpretation can be almost completely automated.

What can DISC tell me?

At its most basic level, DISC measures four factors of an individual's behaviour: Dominance, Influence, Steadiness and Compliance. These behaviours are fairly complex constructs, and aren't easily expressed in single words, but they can be simply characterised as assertiveness, communication, patience and structure.

The real power of DISC, though, comes from its ability to interpret the relations between these factors, for example where a highly Dominant person has an equally high level of Influence, they will behave quite differently to an equally Dominant individual without that Influence. Using this information, a DISC profile can be used to describe a job seekers general approach, including their motivations and dislikes, strengths and weaknesses, and some of the basic assumptions they make about other people. It can also go far in helping to predict how a person will react to a specific set of circumstances.

Once the interviewee has completed the DISC personality profile questionnaire you can view the personal DISC report. The Classic myDISCprofile report gives an in-depth analysis into their personal style and behaviour, you can also choose to upgrade to an Enhanced report which contains a more detailed analysis, including sections on specific work areas such as sales and service (recommended test). MyDISCprofile also offers you the chance to purchase a professional PDF version of the interviewee's report, which can be used to supplement the interview process.

As well as these report options, MyDISCprofile offers you the chance to compare the interviewees profile against particular job roles to explore their suitability to that role.

DISC applications: career development

There are a number of ways in which DISC personality profile can be used to help in business-oriented matters, mostly relating in some way to either the recruitment or assessment of staff. Outside this corporate arena, however, DISC also has possibilities in terms of personal development.

It is important to note that there are a multitude of factors that affect the choice of candidate for each employer and each vacancy. DISC personality assessment alone cannot provide a definitive conclusion, but it is able to provide guidance in deciding whether a particular career path is suited to an individual or not. DISC personality profile results tend to be less reliable for young people under the age of twenty or so, because before this age the personal style tends to be in something of a state of flux. The precise age at which the behavioural type reaches a stable form will vary from individual to individual.

In its simplest terms, using personality assessment for career development is a very similar process to that seen in recruitment or assessment scenarios. A person's DISC profile series is compared against an ideal Job Profile for a particular career, and the closeness of the match between the two styles will give an indication of how well that individual's style is suited to the career area in question.