These tests typically measure one’s aptitudes and reasoning abilities through time-restricted multiple-choice questions. They come in many forms, from simple questionnaires to more sophisticated gamified versions.
Cognitive tests are most often in seen in recruitment settings but can also be used when evaluating current employees’ learning agility.
hese analyse specific aspects of an individual’s personality, such as strengths and blind spots. They present respondents with questions about their feelings or behaviors when in specific situations in order to quantifiably measure specific behavioral traits.
For example, our Thriving Index strength-based assessment looks at 10 factors, further divided into 27 sub-factors such as growth mindset, grit, optimism, flexibility and autonomy. When we work with clients, we map their competency framework per job level to these subfactors. We then design custom reports that evaluate the attributes they require depending on the job hierarchy. For example, when recruiting for a senior leader, they may need to measure things like strategic thinking whilst for mid-level executives, they will look for good people-managers.
Personality assessments are used both in recruitment scenarios or in situations where we want to assess current employees.
Because behavioral assessments are self-reports, one could question the value and accuracy of their results. However, data measured by these tests has generally been proven to be of high validity in several quantitative reviews of hundreds of research studies.
At Mercer Talent Enterprise, we look at two important factors: consistency and stability.
