Qualifications and experience are determining factors of performance. However, one’s personality is equally important. Odessa Farrugia from Misco explains why more employers should be carrying out psychometric assessments to know their employees better.

By time, organisations do change the way they operate to become more efficient and employees, as human beings, are susceptible to the changes around them. Their characters and disposition towards the company they work for are affected by these changes.

Is this disposition compatible with the company and its ongoing changes? Are employees adapting well in the company? Are they relating well with the organisational set-up and their colleagues? Psychometric assessments are very objective methods that help assess all this in a scientific way and the results are impressively accurate.

Misco has been conducting psychometric assessments for employers since 2005. These assessments present a fair and effective method of comparing competencies of candidates, regardless of their experience and educational background. Psychometric assessments are not only applied to candidates sitting for job interviews but also internally with companies who want to review their employees’ ongoing experience at the workplace, for appraisals and as part of a company’s efforts to sustain employees’ personal development.

These assessments give a ‘human’ dimension to the way employers want to understand their people. When we conduct them, we notice how people react when they see their personality ‘presented’ to them on paper. While many express themselves positively when they see the outcome, others find it difficult to accept certain outcomes about their personality. However, I feel this is important because this helps them grow into better persons and, ultimately, better employees.

Any employer can choose to apply these psychometric assessments. From an employee’s point of view, they are not the ‘be all and end all’ but an additional tool with which their character, personality and traits can be assessed, in their interest and the company’s.

When you know yourself better you perform better

We offer various types of assessments that can be customised according to the job, the operations of the company and the specific duties required from the eventual employee chosen. Abroad, these tests are extremely popular and well ingrained during all stages in the HR lifecycle.

Using psychometric assessments gives firms a competitive edge especially at an age when more organisations want to know more about their employees and what potential they hold. Knowing that such assessments can help them discover candidates’ core competencies more accurately and use them for the benefit of the organisation makes these tools even more beneficial.

We believe in the importance of using these tools because they are an opportunity for employers to obtain a scientific and very accurate personality assessment of their employees or the new candidates they are interviewing. Companies already take many important and strategic decisions based on researched data and scientific studies. So when companies are investing so much in their employees, they want to know they are investing in the right people and for that particular role. At Misco, we have come to appreciate how reliable these assessments are.

Employers want their people to fit with their organisation, their culture and the way the company interacts with its customers. Psychometric tests therefore help a company assess whether its current and future employees are compatible with the job role being performed.

Psychometric assessments deal with personality traits. Therefore, these assessments may be applied by employers from practically any sector, such as engineering companies, accountancy firms, sales and administration, HR, energy, automotive and aviation.

Although different sectors demand specific qualities, these transferable skills such as organisational skills, interpersonal relationships, strategic capabilities, creativity, resilience and self-confidence are universal and important traits any employer would want to see in his people.

I feel these assessments help employees discover themselves more. From experience, I have seen how these tools help a person challenge their behaviour in that the outcome sometimes surprises even the person completing it.

Having said that, this is something very positive because when you know yourself better, you perform better, something everyone ultimately benefits from.

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