Psychological assessment

What can you do with a psychological assessment?

A psychological assessment uses tests, questionnaires, interviews, games, role plays, and assignments to identify aspects of intelligence, personality, drives, experiences, and behavior.

As a result, a psychological assessment allows you to predict a person’s performance, indicate desired development, and identify detrimental risks.

As a result, a psychological assessment provides essential information to help you decide on recruitment or a career step.

A psychological assessment helps you avoid making the wrong talent decisions. After all, the cost of hiring the wrong candidate quickly amounts to between a ½ and a full year’s salary.

Which aspects does a psychological assessment identify?

First and foremost, we can observe behavior. This can be done with assessment exercises and structured selection interviews. Serious gaming can also provide helpful behavioral insights. Competencies are often used to enable us to standardize the observations in terms of language and meaning. Many organizations already use competency sets and are familiar with them. A competency is a successful observable behavior with a fixed definition. Behavior-oriented observation and interviews enable us to assess the level to which a candidate masters a particular competence.

To go a step further, beyond observing behavior and estimating the development potential of competencies, we need to look at psychological attributes. These are in the area of intelligence, personality, and motivators.

competenties en onderliggende constructen
Psychological assessment: competencies and underlying constructs

When can you use a psychological assessment?

There are 4 main reasons for using a psychological assessment:

1. You don’t know the candidate

A psychological assessment is a way to gain in-depth insight into a candidate quickly. It gives you insight into the analytical potential, the personality structure, the drives, and social and leadership skills. Examples include contact, presentation, and (leadership) conversation skills. On all these aspects, a well-founded estimate is made of the likelihood that your candidate will be successful in the intended position. This may reflect an emphasis on immediate suitability or, if your candidate is allowed to grow in the position, more on potential.

2. You know the employee but not in a new working context.

A different context may require other competencies from employees. For example, if the nature of the work changes, or in the case of growth and job changes. You do not have performance data to match the new work context. The question is:  will the employee succeed in a new work context? An assessment offers more insight into opportunities and risks. Other applications of psychological assessment are internal (growth) selection, succession issues, fleet reviews, and leadership trajectories.

3. You are looking for a new challenge for an employee.

This is a typical career issue. The key focus is not the organizational demand. However, the primary focus is an employee’s needs, abilities, and strengths. The psychological assessment here indicates meaningful work contexts. This type of assessment is mainly used in cases of redundancy, inadequate performance, outplacement, and reintegration. Moreover, a career assessment is a customized assessment in which a search process for suitable work contexts is initiated based on the results.

4. You want to acquire new talent

This is a new application for assessment and testing. Many people are curious about themselves. If you can give them valuable insights about your organization, you might even be able to tempt potential candidates into participating in assessments during the sourcing phase. Of course, a complete assessment is then over-the-top, but a pré or self-assessment (often gamified), which provides them with relevant feedback, is an option. If you can combine such an assessment with fun and accessibility, then you’re on to a good thing. Suddenly, you’ve got pre-selected candidates who you can try to tempt further along your recruitment process and transform into actual applicants. Starcheck specializes in developing and marketing short online, gamified pre-assessments and self-assessments.

Assessment as a disguised form of evaluation.

Please don’t do it! Evaluation is only done based on performance in the relevant context. Ethically and legally, it’s the only way. Assessment is not a replacement for evaluating an employee’s performance. However, it is interesting to compare performance data with assessment data afterward.

By comparing, equations can be made between psychometric attributes and performance. These insights can then be used for future recruitment campaigns. Do you want to know more, quickly? Call us, or fill out the contact form.

Psychological assessment at Starcheck