The Recruitment Toolbox: Navigating the Maze of Psychometric Testing

Words by Bridget Scott (she/her)

As graduation rolls around, another generation of outgoing students are realising how much debt they’re in and are beginning a frantic hunt for a job that could pass as a career. Thus heralding in the season of cover letters, resumes, rejections, and despair. Of all the recruitment stages, psychometric testing is used to examine candidates for specific capabilities and characteristics, and stands apart. Built by developers and administered by niche companies, these assessments quickly spiral into a confusing maze where the right answer eludes even the most contentious graduate. 

The purpose and application of psychometric testing varies. Generally, tests are standardised, sat under a time limit, and attempted within 48 hours of the applicant being notified. There are straightforward literacy and numeric reasoning tests that examine fundamental skills that most university students would be comfortable with. However, other assessments comprising of abstract reasoning tests focussing on patterns, video games appraising strategy, or personality quizzes evaluating emotional intelligence, employ obscure tactics to extrapolate inferences about applicants. Drawing on positive psychology principles, they attempt to place candidates on a spectrum that measures their openness, contentiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. 

Skee Jackson, a Senior Talent Development Consultant at H2R Consulting, explains that, for employers, recruitment is a resource-intensive exercise. Big organisations like government ministries, commercial law firms, and consultancies can attract a massive amount of interest in available positions. For them, psychometric testing is one tool used to sift through applications in the pursuit of finding someone who will fit in well to a company and aren’t “just going to use the job and the training and go somewhere else.” From Skee’s perspective, students applying for intern and graduate roles might actually have an advantage in taking these exercises than those further along in their careers, due to more recent experience with standardised testing and assessment under exam-style conditions. 

This has not been the experience of Sabrina Swerdloff. With the end of her Bachelor of Science in Economics, Maths, and Statistics right around the corner, the third-year student has been applying for graduate roles for 2023. After applying for more than a dozen roles, she’s been invited to sit up to five different sets of psychometric testing, all of which have been immensely stressful, reminiscent of “doing an exam for uni—but more of them in a shorter time frame.” After being hit with multiple rejections, her frustrations are mounting. The assessments have started to feel like an arbitrary IQ test, where dismissal of her application says, “fuck you, you don’t have an innate talent we’ve decided to measure.”

Skee doesn’t deny the characteristics assessed are relatively narrow, saying that for most people “it is what it is”. Instead, she recommends applicants reframe their thinking. She emphasises the importance of young professionals on “knowing where [their] strengths lie” and remembering that testing is just one measure of applicants’ competencies. Ideally, companies administering the tests should provide feedback to applicants—this is a priority for H2R as they believe strongly in “respecting people's time and maintaining transparency and engagement throughout the process.” At a practical level, however, this will vary depending on who is facilitating the assessment—the organisation looking for staff or an internal recruitment team or an external company—and their respective policies. Sabrina got in touch with one company that offered feedback but was disappointed to be read an automatically generated pdf that simply said she “ performed in the average range” and “should be able to benefit from further training in this area.”

Millie Douglas is a Senior Career Consultant at the Victoria University of Wellington’s career centre and works with students to navigate the recruitment process. She acknowledges that students can find psychometric testing frustrating, and is often surprised when students share their results with her, observing they are “often not fair” and “don’t reflect the same experience of that student” she has. However, she reminds students that developing these assessments takes significant resources and every time a test is sat, the data is used to inform and improve these processes. 

 When asked how to approach psychometric tests, Millie’s perspective differs from Skee as she argues preparation is possible: “In a perfect world, as soon as someone says you’ve got a test, don’t assume you’re going to do well in it, even if you’re smart and capable.” She warns students that the two–three practice questions that usually precede the official test are often unusually easy and lull candidates into a false sense of security. Well-designed tests get more difficult as candidates progress and too often candidates find that “three minutes later, the questions are tough and they’re struggling.” 

Instead, she recommends that once invited to complete a test, candidates should try to find out exactly what they will be assessed on. If the information isn’t easily available, then an email to the hiring company or test administrators is needed—find out what the test is, which company developed it, and whether they will provide practice tests themselves. When balancing job applications with study and extracurriculars, students should arm themselves with the hard facts needed to work smarter rather than harder. Then it’s time to practise. Searching for the test on Google should generate a number of practice tests to help applicants become comfortable with the format before valuable test time is wasted. If the company won’t share the specifics of a test, the CareerHub website has a range of sample tests that act as a “brain gym,” helping students to approach assessments with confidence . 

For fourth-year student Kirsty McCulloch, a couple of days spent practising prior to taking her logical reasoning test requested by law firms and large corporates noticeably improved her results. But not all tests are made equal. Nervous about disclosing her dyslexia to companies early in the hiring process, Kirsty found that because she processes words on screens easier than on paper, she performed better on skills and game-based assessments.

Millie says that, theoretically, the purpose of standardised testing is that anyone doing a similar test in similar conditions should get a similar result. But if candidates feel a test was unfair, especially for cultural reasons, game developers are often responsive to feedback—even if the companies administering tests are uninterested. For Kirsty, some tests encouraged applicants to be in touch with game developers if they experienced issues. However, she notes that jumping through administrative hoops to liaise with corporates within the 48 hours the test was available was not a practical solution. 

 Millie stresses that the recruitment process is a holistic one and “most companies score candidates on every part of the selection process.” Applicants should take heart that a strong cover letter and résumé can balance out weaker testing results and know that the recruitment toolbox is constantly growing and evolving. This is affirmed by Skee, who advises companies to ask “what are the potentials” in candidates. 

For students, the pressures of psychometric testing can be moderated through practice, a professional mindset, and using the resources available through CareerHub. In the short term, applicants should know that job hunting invokes a stressful mess of emotions in even the most reasoned candidates, but support out of the maze is waiting for those who reach out.