(soft music)
So let's talk a little bit about our approach
to psychological assessment.
Psychological assessment is a very important offering to us.
We are involved in psychologically assessing literally
thousands of people per annum, and in trying
to make this information as useful as possible
to organisations and to individuals
and so those are really two reasons
that we tend to psychologically assess people.
The most common by a long way is the concept
of assessing people for recruitment purposes to evaluate,
and predict how successful people are likely
to be through the recruitment process,
but as well as that to help clients
to identify risks in potential candidates
which they seek to avoid.
In addition to that, though we psych test people
for development purposes and there are times
when people will need to go from level A
to level B, let's say, or to change their role
and understanding the abilities
of those people can be very, very important indeed.
Now, in the previous video called
the science of candidate assessment,
I talked a little bit about the measures
that we use to assess people,
and I won't talk so much about the specifics of that,
but I will say that what they are
and they are verbal and numerical
and abstract abilities which are intelligence measures,
measures of counterproductive work behaviours
where we're seeking to predict how likely it is
that somebody will be likely
to undertake these counterproductive work behaviours,
which tend to be either directed to individuals,
or an organisation.
Personality, we're using the HEXACO personality inventory,
and I went through the factors
in the HEXACO personality inventory in the science
of candidate selection video.
And we're also talking
about the Schwartz personal values questionnaire.
Now on the screen, you see an example report
which gives you a risk summary.
This is from one of our methods of executive recruitment
from our online psychological assessment portal.
And so we really provide two levels of service,
one is a web-based service
where we give a client a login and the client self-manages
their psychological assessment activities.
So they test as many people as they want to,
they buy credits, and they use the following tools.
They use the intelligence measures,
the counterproductive work behaviours measures,
the personality measures and the personal values measures.
And what you see on the screen now is a risk summary
of a particular individual.
That would be what you would find
through our online psychological assessment portal,
but we also undertake executive level psychological
assessment and executive level psychological assessment
is a service where people provide us
with a job description of what they're seeking to recruit.
And typically, we'll interview the client about the role
that they're seeking to fill.
And then what we'll do is that we'll recommend a range
of assessments, and very often, it would be
the assessments that we've just described,
but we write a personalised report for those clients.
Two different levels of service,
and often the executive level service
is used for more senior positions
and there's a price point difference.
You're typically talking in excess of 1000
to $2,000 for that service where at the online psychological
assessment portal product sort of level,
you're talking about somewhere around 200
to 300 Australian dollars.
Now, one of the reasons that we developed
the online psychological assessment portal
is because of the fact that we had many clients
who were very keen to avail themselves
of psychological assessment, but they didn't believe
that they could afford it.
And so we approached the publishers,
and in many cases directly, the authors
of the instruments that we considered
to be the best psychological assessment tools
that were available in the world.
And we were delighted to find
that they were prepared to come on board,
and so we now are publishers of these instruments
and we've integrated them
through our psychological assessment portal.
Now, this is a unique product,
there's no way other way to put it.
In the case of the psychological assessment portal,
you're getting six assessments in one report.
Now, that report adds up to less than five pages,
and in fact in most cases, if you were
to get six individual psychological assessment tools,
you'd end up with reports of 10 pages plus on each one.
And so instead of having to wade through 60 to 80 pages
of description of what the results mean,
what we've done is that we've given people
a very brief description and risk assessments based
on what these measures mean and what kinds
of risks, they represent for hirers.
And so you see that the start
of a psychological assessment report
through our psychological assessment portal looks like
this risk summary.
And then what you'll have is you'll have
the three measures of intelligence, verbal reasoning
and you'll see the normative results here.
This is a person who's been compared
to a managerial population,
and you see their score in a percentage sense,
how they compare to that population,
then their numerical reasoning,
how smart they are in respect of numbers,
how effectively and quickly they can deal
with numerical information.
And then thirdly, abstract reasoning.
And abstract reasoning is the capacity of the person
to deal with abstract issues such as problem-solving,
such as strategy, such as tactics.
Now, those three things in combination
if a person's high in all of those things,
what that means is that most of the challenges
that they're likely to encounter in the workplace,
they're likely to be able to cope with quite comfortably.
In addition to that, as I mentioned in a previous video,
people who are high on these measures tend to be much less
likely to undertake counterproductive work behaviours.
So you'll get those results and a risk measurement
for the each candidate who you've assessed.
Then you get the counterproductive work behaviours measure
which looks like this and you'll see you get a T-score
on each of these measures
and a T-score has an average of 50.
So if they're at 50, they're exactly population average.
And if they're above 50, that means they're above average.
If they're below 50, they're below average.
Now, you'll see that there's a word form
that describes each of these characteristics.
And the person that you see on
the screen is a very high risk
from a counterproductive work behaviour point of view
because they're high on overall counterproductive
work behaviours, but they're also high on individual,
or interpersonal counterproductive work behaviours
which are things like bullying, harassment,
snubbing and ignoring other people,
inability to get on with colleagues,
but they're also very high
on organisational counterproductive work behaviours.
And what that means is that there a significant risk
to do things like say bad things about the organisation,
to do things like steal things from the organisation,
to do things like ignore your safety rules,
things which are organizationally focused,
rather than individually focused.
So you'll get a score on each of those dimensions,
but in addition to that, you'll see that you have a list
of admissions, and this person has admitted
to a lot of things which suggests
that they have done bad things in the past.
Now, when people see counterproductive work behaviour
admissions, they often wonder why would people admit
to such things.
The truth of the matter is that I don't believe
that there is almost anyone on earth
who wakes up in the morning intending to be evil.
I think what happens
is that people undertake counterproductive work behaviours
such as the ones shown on the screen there
because they simply don't understand
that these things are a problem.
Think of your interactions with people at work
through your career today.
I'll bet there have been times where you've spoken
to somebody about something that they've done
that you consider to be a very serious misbehaviour
and they simply don't get it.
So counterproductive work behaviours,
integrity generally can be considered to be a blind spot.
People do it because they simply don't understand exactly
what the problem is.
So measuring people's counterproductive work behaviour risks
is an incredibly important thing
for retaining the integrity of your workplace,
and protecting your current employees against the risk
of hiring people who might be likely to do the sorts
of things that we see on the screen there.
So we'll talk now about personality.
Personality has a number
of incredibly important characteristics,
one of them is honesty, humility.
I mentioned in a previous video that Lee and Ashton
in their breakthrough in 2005, 2006
in assessing personality identified this honesty,
humility characteristic.
And it turns out that employees who are honest,
and not arrogant are much more effective employees
and much less likely to do bad things either
to the organisation or to colleagues.
Then you'll see you'll get the rest
of the person's personality profile with characteristics,
such as emotionality, the degree
to which they're emotionally stable or unstable,
whether they're extroverts or introverts.
And you'll see that the advice on each
of these areas depends on what we know
from a research point of view
of each of these characteristics.
So emotionality we say it says low is better in each cases.
When it comes to extroversion,
you see, it says depends on the job.
You see, when it says agreeableness,
you'll see that it says low is of concern.
In other words, no matter what the job is
if people are low in agreeableness, it tends to mean
that they're angry and difficult and that's a bad thing.
Conscientiousness high is better, openness depends on job.
Now we will help you to understand
which of those characteristics that depend on job
are the sorts of things that you might like
to consider when you're doing your recruitment activities
and where you're trying to make decisions
about who you should hire.
Incidentally, we back this with interpretive manuals
which help you to understand what these things mean,
but as well as that, we run training.
So, for instance, we have an accreditation programme
which helps people to understand
how to use these tools in a practical sense.
Finally, we assess values through a thing called
the Schwartz personal values questionnaire,
and Shalom Schwartz identified
that there are 10 dominant values in amongst people
as they interact with other people.
And one of the things that values gives you
is that it's an exceptionally good measure
of whether people are going to fit a particular workplace.
So you can decide the sort of value set, you're looking
for in amongst prospective employees,
but one of the things that we strongly recommend
is that it's a very good idea to test existing employees
for the value set that they possess
because it's the consonants between the value set
of the prospective employee and the existing employee
that's going to determine whether people will fit
in comfortably or not.
Values also gives an indication of whether people are likely
to undertake counterproductive work behaviours,
and we give further information about that with clients
that we're working closely with.
But in addition to that, it's most powerful characteristic
is the ability to identify fit.
And we have so many clients that tell us above else
what we're looking for is culture match.
We've got a distinctive culture,
and we need somebody who's going to fit that.
Well, values are, of course
an incredibly important driver of culture.
Now the price point
of our psychological assessment online portal
is between 200 and 300 Australian dollars.
And for many clients,
what that means is that it takes something
which is historically been unaffordable by access
to some of the best psychological assessment tools
in the world, and it makes them very easy to afford,
but in an extremely easy to digest fashion.
So if you'd like to find out more about these methods,
maybe you'd like to see some of the questions
that are involved in these assessments,
maybe you'd like to see some reports,
maybe you'd like to try some of the questions for yourself,
just click on the link below this video
and you'll be taken to the right spot in our website.