Think psychometric assessments are just for recruiting?

This week one of our team heard it again. This time from a seasoned HR professional: Psychometric Assessments are a recruiting tool, end of story.

This mistaken impression is understandable. After all, psychometric assessment companies and human resource media are accustomed to marketing the tools as aids for making better hiring decisions. Moreover, up until the emergence of Next-gen human assessment technology, organisations had no cost-effective way to apply psychometric assessments to support people decision-making at scale or across many use cases. As a result, if you were going to use a costly and time-intensive psychometric assessment, you did it during recruiting.

Where Psychometric Assessments can’t; Human Assessment Technology can

But employees and organisations don’t stay frozen at the point of initial recruitment. Roles change, new positions open up, organisational objectives shift, green employees mature into potential leaders. This constant change requires actionable human and environmental insights that traditional psychometric assessments can’t deliver. But Next-gen human assessment technology can.

A multi-purpose employee lifecycle tool can reduce churn and increase happiness

Here’s how. Unlike traditional psychometric assessments, Next-gen human assessment technology combines behavioural and cognitive testing. The person can then be compared against capabilities needed for a required role, project or even another “mapped” individual. This map reveals characteristics of the individual unlikely to alter much over time. As a result, you can map once, but evaluate endlessly.
While the technology is obviously powerful for recruiting, it is really a multi-purpose employee lifecycle tool that can be used for onboarding, professional development, talent management and more.

As HR industry commentator, Josh Bersin, recently observed: the world’s top firms spend only marginally more on recruiting than other companies. So what are they doing? According to Bersin, they are human-centred. This isn’t just some kind of fluffy concept, it’s about identifying and unlocking the potential in employees, because if you can do that, you will likely need to be doing a lot less recruiting (i.e. less churn) and a lot more connection of internal role opportunities with the people you already have.


We’re in the middle of a skills shortage that is likely to get worse as the Australian Financial Review recently reported. No company is going to be able to recruit its way out. Factors like demographic, education and immigration mean you’re talking about an entrenched supply problem.

Your staff are dynamic and adaptable resources

So what does the smart organisation do?

It looks inside and sees its current staff as a dynamic and adaptable resource.
That’s where the multi-purpose employee lifecycle aspect of Next-gen human assessment technology comes into play. Take a real-world problem like reluctance to do an assessment during recruiting. We hear this one frequently from HR. Basically, because of the tight market, you may end up with only one hireable candidate. You have almost no choice to fill the role and you don’t want to delay or possibly derail the hiring of the candidate by doing an assessment. But despite your reluctance you’d like more insights into the person.


Here’s where Next-gen human assessment technology proves its value in the employee lifecycle by being incorporated into the employee’s onboarding process. Instead of using assessment as a comparative tool against other candidates, the technology becomes a tool that seeks to unlock the value of an already hired employee mapped against a role and environment. As a result, the onboarding process is not just about getting the employee up to speed in their new role, it is about understanding what remedial steps, interventions, role adjustments might be made from Day One that will drive even higher performance from this individual.

Supercharge employee mobility and career partnering

Once the individual has been mapped, the organisation can supercharge their employee’s mobility and their internal career. The mapping flags strength based paths to upskilling and reskilling, can help in the assembly of the best internal teams, and even offer insights and best next steps for leadership development and talent management. Next-gen human assessment technology opens the path to exciting internal mobility and careers. For example, if you know that the potential capabilities of a Product Manager mapped to that of an Account Manager, you’ve unlocked an opportunity that would have otherwise gone undiscovered.


In other words, at every step the organisation has deep visibility into the characteristics and capabilities of their employees in such a way that the human potential and, even, happiness of the individual becomes actionable. This is not so much about technology as a predictor of success as much as it is about technology as an enabler, an unlocker, an accelerant of high performance, retention and a more supportive workplace culture.


Assessment for recruitment is a critical tool, but it’s just the beginning of what assessment can now do.

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