Psychometrics 2020: how will online ability and personality testing develop in the coming years

1. Psychometrics 2020: How will online
ability and personality testing
develop in the coming years
Juho Toivola
#hruZurich
10.9.2015

2. Warmup
• How many of you have some time completed
a psychometric test?
• How many of you have in your job role
administered psychometric tests?
• How many of you think psychometric tests are
useful?

3. Are psychometric tests still relevant?
• Don’t we (HR experts) know better?
• “Cultural fit and group dynamics are more
important – testing individuals is old-
fashioned”
• “Testing is not a suitable selection method for
expert, managerial or leadership roles”

4. Test technology in 2020
Online is the standard. Pen-and-paper is frowned
upon.
Adaptive testing:
- In ability tests: adjusting difficulty level on the go
- In personality inventories: forced ranking of
behaviors with similar ratings
Mobile. Gamified. Social.

5. Real-time scoring (example)
Answer API
Score API
Google

6. Big Data and personality
• Your Facebook profile has more “test items”
than any personality test could ever have
• With statistical methods, it is easy to predict
your personality traits with high reliability
• Do we need separate tests or should we just
request access to personal online data?

7. Item Response Theory (IRT)
Not all questions have equal weight
Extroversion:
• “I like to go to parties”
• “I never want to be alone”
Mathematical ability:
• “2+2=?”
• “23*25+53/24-14=?”

8. Situational Judgment Tests (SJTs)
• Situational Judgment Tests (SJT’s) assess how you
approach situations encountered in the workplace.
• Whilst there is some variation in how they are
delivered, they typically present you with a written
description of a scenario and ask you to select the
appropriate response from a multiple choice list.
• Situational Judgement Tests have high predictive
validity, when used correctly

9. Other interesting developments
• Neurological measurement of emotions and
neural correlates of cognitive capacity
• Face recognition technology and machine
vision in psychological assessment
• Online-based skills testing (eg. languages,
Excel, programming) has become more and
more common

10. Let’s discuss!

11. Thank you!