Our business is dedicated to the application of these techniques for the selection of experienced and trainee personnel within the computer industry, working with Human Resources and IT professionals within both companies that provide computer systems or organisations that use them. We have been providing these services to small and major organisations throughout the world for many years.
For many organisations and people, their only exposure to psychometric testing has been the use of personality testing. These can be very useful to the HR professional, but they are fundamentally a 'sign-posting' system that greatly depend on the skills of the post test interviewer. In some ways they attempt to measure the immeasurable because of the complexity and permutations of personality, the influence of permanent factors and the vagaries of transient events. That's why you cannot fail a personality test.
Psychometrics, the company, is not involved in personality testing of any kind. We focus on a more precise science called Job Related Testing. We measure the measurable with tests designed to identify the subtleties of aptitude, knowledge and experience
These highly predictive tests address two aspects of IT recruitment. Aptitude testing for trainees, typically graduates, and skills testing for experienced IT personnel.
Aptitude Testing
Aptitude testing is all about identifying a specific talent within an individual. It could be any kind of talent, but we are exclusively involved with aptitude testing related to specific job functions within IT.
If you wish to discover whether a child had a natural talent for ball games, the best thing to do is give him or her a ball and see what they do with it. Whether or not they have that natural aptitude is very quickly apparent. Similarly, we have created a learn-and-apply technique, utilised within psychometric tests such as B-APT, where the examinee first learns a very basic programming language, then applies it to write a number of simple programs. The individual could be a computer science graduate or someone who has never even seen a computer, yet the latter could possibly have the greater programming aptitude. (We carried out a survey some years ago that revealed some 21% of computer science graduates had no real aptitude for programming!)
IT Skills Testing
It is very difficult to prove whether the skills and experience stated by the candidates are as strong and extensive as they claim. The HR recruitment officer can study the CV carefully. The IT Manager can ask his 'four favourite questions', but you don't get to know how good they really are until they are in your employment. It can be very expensive if a major project grinds to a halt because the new programmer you hired turns out to be a 'talk a good job'.
The skills tests from Psychometrics are designed by subject matter experts from the top of the international software tree working in close conjunction with our highly accomplished test designers. They deal with all the key content areas of a given programming language. Take JAVA for instance. This test reveals the candidate's knowledge in respect of Object Orientated Programming (Polymorphism, Inheritance and object & classes), Language Constructs (String arrays, scope variables & threads) and General Concepts (Exception handling, running & compiling). It goes to where few interviewers would care to tread. It is the ultimate technical interview.
It can directly and indirectly cost an awful lot of money to recruit the wrong person. Our IT skills and aptitude tests can help you to get it right.