Key Takeaways
- Behavioral assessments are a critical part of the recruitment process, often determining person-role fit.
- Preparing for behavioral assessments enhances self-awareness and helps you articulate your strengths during interviews.
- Psychometric tests provide valuable insights into your personality, helping you identify areas of improvement and align your strengths with your career goals.
- Familiarizing yourself with behavioral assessments can reduce test anxiety and improve your performance.
- These assessments allow you to evaluate whether a role aligns with your personality and aspirations, ensuring a better fit for both you and the organization.
Behavioral Assessments in Recruitment
Most job applicants would agree that they have undergone some kind of behavioral assessment at some point during the selection process. This isn’t surprising; personality and other psychometric tests have become a part of the recruitment and selection process in many organizations.
Preparing for Behavioral Assessments
So, what kind of preparation do you do, as job applicants? Refresh your memory of theories and concepts, read up some case studies, take practice tests for reasoning and other cognitive tests, browse through the company’s website and white papers, work out some problems and exercises in your domain, and so on.
Most of the job applicants don’t bother to prepare for the behavioral aspects that would be gauged in different ways and through different approaches, be it psychometric assessments, group discussions, or interviews. Many fail to understand that the behavioral/personality attributes are often deal-breakers in the selection process. How, then, does one prepare for assessments of behavior, attitudes, and personality?
The Value of Practice in Behavioral Assessments
The idea of practice tests may apply here as well, but in a different sense. Job applicants can take personality and other behavioral assessments before the recruitment process (or even before applying for a job opening!).
The fundamental aim of any behavioral assessment is to provide reliable and valid insights about the test taker. These insights are being used by organizations to make HR decisions, but the utility of behavioral assessment is not limited to just that.
Self-Awareness Through Behavioral Assessments
Why shouldn’t test takers themselves gain reliable and valid insights about themselves? Taking behavioral and personality assessments is beneficial beyond one’s job hunt. Psychometric assessments provide valuable insights about oneself, helping in increasing one’s awareness of one’s own psychological attributes, recognizing strengths, as well as acknowledging weaknesses and identifying areas of improvement.
And enough has been said and proven about the importance of self-awareness, especially in the context of work and careers. You can make conscious efforts to build on your strengths and mold yourself to meet your aspirations.
Leveraging Behavioral Insights for Job Interviews
Psychometric assessments also help identify specific behaviors and examples that illustrate the presence of a set of traits in the test taker and how it is reflected in their actions and experiences.
You can talk about these examples of behaviors in your job interviews, demonstrating how your personality traits would enable you to perform better in the given role and/or context. This would help you articulate yourself better, rather than talk about qualities you think you have or picked up from the internet when you searched “What to say at job interviews.”
Behavioral Assessments for Person-Role Fit
Many recruiters use behavioral assessments to examine the person-role fit. Well, job applicants can do the same! You can take psychometric assessments and gauge for yourself if the role description and requirements match your personality, motivations, aspirations, and so on.
Jobs are a mutual exchange between the individual and the organization anyway; both parties should review the ‘fit.’ Examine if you fit the role and if the role fits your expectations, because job applications require genuine effort and should, thus, be worth it.
Reducing Test Anxiety with Behavioral Assessments
The word ‘test’ is not usually associated with pleasant emotions, and this is true in the case of psychometric ‘tests’ as well. Being evaluated can be stressful for some people. Taking behavioral assessments before going through the selection process might prove to be useful in reducing test anxiety.
One can familiarize oneself with how behavioral assessments generally are, the question patterns, and the kind of insights they provide.
