By: Daniel Harrison-Pinder

How Psychometric Testing Could Improve Your Career Prospects

As research into recruitment continues to prove that interviews alone are rarely a sufficient method for best assessing a candidate’s suitability for a role, more and more employers are looking to other methods to find their perfect fit. One of these methods is psychometric testing, which can include a whole range of assessments from determining personality traits to measuring a person’s aptitude for their desired career.

Test Yourself

While much has been written about why psychometric testing is a good idea from an employer’s perspective, it’s important to recognise how useful psychometric testing can be for jobseekers too.

Firstly, psychometric tests based around personality assessments can be a great way to understand how you actually behave and communicate in the workplace. We all think we know ourselves pretty well but personality tests can often throw up some interesting traits of which we may not have been aware. Knowing your strengths, weaknesses, and the way you tend to react in different situations can not only help you understand what you need to work on but also help you get a better idea of what sort of workplace you yourself are looking for and which roles you’d fit into best.

As well as learning important information about yourself that could guarantee career happiness, there’s also the fact that you’re very likely to come up against psychometric testing at some point in your career and that it can never hurt to be prepared. Practising psychometric tests means that you’ll know what to expect should you have to take one during a recruitment process and you’ll be more able to show yourself at your best. Similarly, knowing your own results will help you formulate good answers to the usual questions employers ask about your strengths, weaknesses, and other abilities. 

Top Tests

If you’re job hunting, thinking of a career change, or are just interested in improving your prospects in your current position, here are a couple of free resources and test providers you can access online.

  • Insights Discovery – A psychometric tool based on the psychology of Carl Jung that seeks to help you understand yourself and the relationships you form in the workplace.
  • Myers-Briggs – Find out which of the 16 Myers-Briggs personality types you best fit into.

Remember, there’s no right and wrong in psychometric testing so don’t try to pick the answer you think the test or the employer is looking for. Testing yourself is all about getting insight into your own career so just be honest for the best results!