ARTICLE: How would you fare in an aptitude test for the next job you apply for?

By Melvin Day, Managing Director, Marketing Moves

In days gone by, all it took to get a job was a well written CV, a good personality match with both the recruiter and the client, and two written or verbal references from previous employers.

And this is how it stayed for years. Years!

Then something happened.

Companies woke up to the fact that people can bend the truth on CVs, present a version of themselves in interviews that doesn’t show up on day one, and only provide good references. They also noticed that the people they were hiring were incredibly good socially – which is why they aced the interview – but sometimes not so good technically. Or worse still, acted completely differently under pressure to their care-free interview self, causing their eventual exit.

So companies started to introduce psychometric testing, like the Thomas Test, and this is how it’s stayed for the last 10 – 20 years.

But something new started to happen: people began to game the system. Candidates chose the options they knew the companies wanted, rather than what they would actually do.

So what’s next?

Well, in an ideal world something like an IQ test might be better. However, a higher IQ does not automatically ensure better performance, and is probably wrought with all sorts of legal implications.

Enter aptitude tests.

For the uninitiated, an aptitude test is:

“An examination that attempts to determine and measure a person’s ability to acquire, through future training, some specific set of skills (intellectual, motor, and so on). Such tests yield a profile of scores rather than a single IQ.“

So in a nutshell, it’s measuring how people honesty handle a range of different work-based problems rather than work-based scenarios, ensuring the results are valid and not pinned too highly on intelligence.

At Marketing Moves, we’re finding that more companies are using them in the recruitment process. particularly US software vendors. Indeed, we’re actively encouraging our clients to use them, to validate our own research into the candidates we put forward.

If you’d like to try one, here’s a good free app to prepare yourself:

https://jobflare.com/test-prep/?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=Criteria_Candidates&utm_campaign=Candidates

You never know, you might just be taking one in the next job you take!

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