Behind the Hiring Test Jargon

The world of hiring tests can prove daunting for a company exploring it for the first time. Numerous terms are tossed about such as “personality,” “skills,” “intelligence,” “cognitive ability” and “talents.” But at the end of the day, what are the tests measuring and what are their advantages and disadvantages? Included below is a guide to some of the most popular types of hiring tests in the marketplace today as well as their strengths and weaknesses in measuring a candidate’s “fit.”

The Berke Group’s Guide to Hiring Tests

Most tests used in business settings measure Personality. Personality is used to describe any number of different factors, such as sociability, structure or aggressiveness, all of which are relatively enduring characteristics of the way in which an individual works and interacts with other people. Personality traits are called by a lot of different names, and different hiring tests measure personality in different ways. All of them, however, have this in common – they involve self-report, meaning the person describes him- or herself. Whether by checking off adjectives from a list or agreeing or disagreeing with various self-descriptions, the test-taker is self-reporting. This has a number of real advantages that make personality tests so popular. They are easy to use and administer and very seldom give results that are surprising to the person because the results are based on how the person described himself in the first place. The major disadvantage is that individuals can often figure out how to answer the questions to make themselves look like they think you want them to look.

A recent and popular kind of hiring test for certain kinds of jobs is Skills-Based Testing. Skills are not the same as personality or natural talents. Personality measures a tendency or preference for interacting with people in a certain way. Natural talents are inborn abilities that change very little. Skills, on the other hand, are certain specific behaviors that an individual learns and that usually address a specific type of situation. Skills typically get better with practice. For some jobs, such as a call center operator, there are certain skills that an individual will need to either know or learn in order to be effective. Such skills might include the manner of answering the phone, the use of software for answering questions or the manipulation of the actual hardware. All of these things can be tested in a straightforward fashion. As the behavior required for success in a job becomes more complex, however, skills-based testing becomes less and less predictive of success. This is because the actual skills required, though not insignificant, are generally either already acquired, or can be acquired with experience. In such complex positions, personality characteristics and talents, such as problem-solving abilities or the ability to manage complex interpersonal interactions, are far more important in predicting the success or failure of a person in the job than any actual skill or specific learned behavior that can be measured.

Some hiring tests that were once popular measure Interests. This kind of testing is easy and usually enjoyable. Interests tests are necessarily self-reporting. Usually an interest test lets an individual indicate what kinds of things pique his or her interest or attention. Typically, these tests correlate a person’s interests with the interests of people in various job categories. The problem is that interests tend to change quickly and these tests may provide vastly different answers depending on the mood of the candidate. This kind of testing has not proven to offer a great deal in the way of predictability for performance in jobs.

Intelligence tests measure how well an individual learns from experience, plans, solves problems, understands complex ideas, reasons, and thinks abstractly. Intelligence is a very general factor (often called “g” by psychometricians) and is very predictive – meaning that if you take almost any job and put someone of low intelligence and someone of high intelligence into it, the person with high intelligence will almost always do a better job. The problem is that intelligence is usually already factored into most job searches. Companies effectively rule out anyone with low intelligence by saying they want someone with a college degree and years of successful experience working in a good company, which only leaves candidates with varying degrees of high intelligence. Intelligence tests cannot use self-report; rather, they always give the test-taker a set of problems to solve that are designed to correlate with g.

More recently, Cognitive Ability tests are gaining popularity and are incorporated in some hiring test batteries. Cognitive tests measure how well an individual thinks, reasons and solves problems. They are like intelligence tests but are more specific and carefully structured to target particular types of functioning – like analytical thinking, problem solving or numerical reasoning. Also, like intelligence testing, cognitive tests cannot use self-report. Test-takers are given a specific type of problem to solve and the results are determined by how quickly/accurately they solve the problem.

A type of hiring test that many people in the field do not know about is testing for Natural Talents. Talents are an individual’s natural hard wiring. Talents are what make certain things easy to do for some and more difficult for others. Examples of natural talents are idea productivity, visual speed and accuracy, and cognitive talents like the ability to apply logic to problem solving. Natural talents can be very predictive of performance in certain types of jobs. It is almost always true that if a person is in a job that uses his natural talents, he will perform better and be more productive than if he is in a job that does not use his talents. A person’s natural abilities are measured by means of work samples – actual samples of behavior that rely heavily on the talent being measured.

Very few jobs are simple. Most jobs are performed best by individuals with a unique combination of the attributes measured by the various hiring tests discussed above. For example, successful salespeople are often socially outgoing and assertive, both personality characteristics, but often perform better in their positions if they have high idea productivity and rapid-fire problem-solving ability, both hard-wired talents.

Which is why the Berke Assessment is such a powerful hiring test. The Berke Assessment measures a number of key personality traits and natural talents that can have a dramatic impact on job performance. The Berke allows managers to measure candidates against specific jobs and to tailor the assessment’s job targets so that candidates are measured against the attributes necessary for success based on the organization’s top performers. The end result is valuable, job-specific feedback regarding potential candidates that can be combined with a comprehensive interview process to enable companies to make the best hiring decisions possible.