Using psychometrics for selection

Psychometrics have two main application areas – selection and development. With selection, we use psychometric selection tests to help an organisation figure out what a role requires, and help them choose and decide who are the right people that would be suitable for the job.

How can psychometrics help in selection?

In some organisations, you can see large numbers of applications and applicants for a single job. For organisations with lots of recruitment taking place, there is a need to process these applicants incredibly efficiently and cost-effectively. At the same time, it is very important to get the right choice and select the right people for the role. This is where psychometrics come in.

One of the key benefits of working with psychometric selection tests is you can effectively sift and target your applicants, gaining information about their personality and potential suitability for a role before meeting them. This helps filter your applicant list before inviting to interview. Now, there’s a huge market for that globally, in fact that really was the birth of psychometrics over a hundred years ago.

Where does Lumina Select come in?

Lumina Select helps you accurately understand the jobs that you’re recruiting into with a job profile approach. We feed that into our system, and then through using the Lumina Spark psychometrics, our selection tests help you understand who are the people that are more likely to be successful in the key roles that you’re looking at.

Where we’re wanting to innovate is around the customised use of competencies. Lumina Select will help us quickly analyse a job and configure the competencies required, and very quickly map that to personality with Lumina Spark. The speed of this process, and the creative digital outcome we offer, are key to ensuring a productive use of resources in a selection context.

The other application here is not around competencies but around values. Some organisations are really clear on the values that they aspire for their staff to demonstrate, or the behaviours that they’re looking for. With Lumina Select, it’s possible to accurately understand the values an organisation is looking for, map that to the key psychometrics we have, and create highly customised reports to target the behaviours an organisation is looking for. For example, we recently worked with an organisation that had a very specific definition of staff engagement, unique to their organisation, which came directly from the founder of that organisation. It was sort of built into their DNA. So, through bringing some science to understand what was inherent and intuitive in the founder, we were able to put together a scientifically accurate way of recruiting against those criteria to really create the culture that the organisation wanted.