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Why Candidates should Not Fear taking Psychometric Assessments

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  Psychometric assessments are widely used in the recruitment process and as an effective tool for screening in candidates. Psychometric assessment tools are scientific tests designed to assess an individual’s personality traits and cognitive abilities. These may include predictive index (PI), cognitive ability tests, behavioral assessment tests, emotional intelligence tests, etc.  Their extensive use in the recruitment process is because these assessment tests help evaluate a candidate’s performance, skills, knowledge, attitudes, competencies, personality attributes, and job as well as academic potential. Psychometric assessment tests are standardized tests useful for HR managers and recruiters in the hiring process because they are accurate in predicting a candidate’s behavioral tendencies and his or her competency for a particular job role. The insight about the candidate’s personality and skills enables recruiters make better job-related decisions and provide training for employee

Psychometric Assessment – Why Indian Organizations have been a late starter?

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  Psychometric assessment tests are scientific tests which are designed to help assess an individual’s personality traits and cognitive abilities. Psychometric assessments evaluate an individual’s performance, skills, knowledge, attitudes, competencies, personality attributes, and job as well as academic potential. These standardized tests are useful for recruiters in the hiring process because these tests accurately predict a candidate’s behavioral tendencies and how competent the candidate is for a particular job. The insight about the candidate’s personality and skills help recruiters make better job-related decisions and provide training for employee development.  In leading organizations, recruiters have started using psychometric assessment tools in the hiring process to select candidates who respond well to training, are efficient in their area of work, and possess the required skills for a particular job, so as to enhance business productivity. Psychometric assessment tools hel

Why is EQ Important for Teamwork

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  Daniel Goleman (1998), author of the bestseller, Emotional Intelligence: Why it can Matter More Than IQ, defined emotional intelligence, commonly called EQ (Emotional Quotient), as “the capacity for recognizing our own feelings and those of others, for motivating ourselves, and for managing emotions well in ourselves and in our relationships.” According to Salovey and Mayer (1990), “emotional intelligence is a set of skills that are thought to contribute to the appraisal of emotions in oneself and others. It can also help contribute to the effective regulation of emotions as well as feelings”.  How Components of EQ Aid Teamwork? Teamwork is a collaborative and collective effort of a particular group towards achieving a common goal or completing some task in an effective manner. It has some important aspects such as cooperation, coordination, communication and interdependence. All these aspects are influenced by an underlying dimension or factor – emotional intelligence of the team me

Why cognitive ability test is increasingly becoming important for pre-employment screening?

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  Pre-employment screening is an important process while hiring a suitable candidate for a particular job role. In this process the recruiters or the organization verifies the information which the candidates have supplied through their applications and resumes or CVs. In pre-employment screening, recruiters use different tests, tools, methods, activities or tasks to verify the information and learn more about the candidates and their personalities, strengths, weaknesses, and how suitable they are for the position or job the organization has to offer them. Pre-employment screening till now primarily consisted of administering some IQ or knowledge tests, resume screening, and requiring candidates to do some job-related tasks to assess their skills. However, the trends are now changing. Today, in the modern world of technological advancement marked by changing working environments, cognitive ability tests which help assess a candidate’s ability to adjust to change and other important com

Why EQ is Importance for Leaders

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  Peter Salovey and John D. Mayer (1990), were the ones who coined the term emotional intelligence and defined it as "the subset of social intelligence that involves the ability to monitor one's own and others' feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one's thinking and actions.” In 1998, Daniel Goleman, in his bestseller defined emotional intelligence as “the capacity for recognizing our own feelings and those of others, for motivating ourselves, and for managing emotions well in ourselves and in our relationships. Emotional intelligence describes abilities distinct from, but complementary to, academic intelligence or the purely cognitive capacities measured by IQ.”  In his book, Emotional Intelligence: Why it can Matter More Than IQ, he defined emotional intelligence as “abilities such as being able to motivate oneself and persist in the face of frustrations; to regulate one’s moods and keep distress from swamping the abi

Cognitive Ability versus IQ (Intelligence Quotient)

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What is Cognitive Ability? The word Cognition is defined as the mental processes or mental activities which are associated with thought, language, reasoning, decision-making, and other mental processes. General cognitive ability is the “ability that consistently differentiates individuals on mental abilities regardless of the cognitive task or test” (Jensen, 1998). General cognitive ability is often referred to as general intelligence, general mental ability or aptitude. This general intelligence is also known as g factor and is a construct made up of different cognitive abilities. It is what is common or underlies all mental abilities or skills such as those related to spatial, verbal, numerical and mechanical abilities. Certain components of general intelligence include fluid reasoning, knowledge, quantitative reasoning, visual-spatial reasoning, and working memory. Similarly, cognitive ability has also been defined as “general mental capability involving reasoning, problem solving,

6 Steps to Selecting a Behavioral Assessment Tool

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Parameters to be considered before selecting the behavioral assessment tool for your organization Generally the only parameter that is given the most significance is cost of the assessment. This makes the companies pick up the cheapest option, under an assumption that all psychometric assessment tools are accurate and reliable. I would say, it is better not to have an assessment at all than to have one which gives misleading results. The latter is even more harmful for the organizations and for the psyche of the people. Based on my experience of working in this field, I would say to check the accuracy of the assessment you need to take care of the following parameters while making the selection of the tool that will work best for you: 1.      Reliability of assessment: Reliability refers to the consistency or stability of a measure. If the concept being measured is assumed to be consistent, such as a personality trait, then the measure should yield similar results if the same pe