The words “psychometric profiling” might scare the heck out of most people. Psycho is a bad start to anything, and isn’t profiling what they do to serial killers?
Well, maybe, but let’s stay calm. At Matchpoint Careers, we use psychometrics and we create profiles and nobody’s going crazy here.
Actually, “psychometric profiling” just names the process of gaining an understanding of what people are like at work: how they behave, what kind of environments enable them to thrive and what skills and capabilities they bring to their jobs.
Profiling lets us match people and jobs, by looking at the factors that genuinely predict on-the-job performance. These factors are three:
- 1. Competencies
- 2. Context, or preferences
- 3. Capabilities
What usually makes the most difference in your job performance are your competencies, how you apply your skills and knowledge, how you meet challenges and obstacles, how you act and react at work. Our assessments focus on competency potential, on the specific combinations of interlocking behaviors that studies have shown best predict performance in a job.
There is no one competency or set of competencies that fits every job or level, nor is there any single best competency profile. Don’t try to find one, it doesn’t exist. Different patterns of behavior work in different jobs and for different people. That’s why the competency assessments we use draw, at the most detailed level, on 112 specific behavioral components that fit together in many, many times that number of psychometric profiles.
Face it, you are a complex, rich and interesting person. There are no simple one-word names, no tags, no labels that adequately represent you. You are a mix of competencies, probably a unique mix.
Also extremely important in predicting performance is context, your preferences, values, motives and choices in terms of specific jobs, careers and work environments or company cultures. If you don’t want to do a specific task or job, if you don’t want to toil in certain kinds of company cultures, it doesn’t really matter how good or bad your relevant abilities are.
The third component is capabilities: the skills and knowledge you draw on at work. Specific capabilities are often useful and sometimes essential for a job. You don’t want your brain surgeon to have skipped out on scalpel training in medical school, or to have misunderstood the structure of the limbic system. But the depth of one’s capabilities rarely determines how well that person performs in a job. The best future surgeons are not always those who graduate with the highest honors and hardly ever those who have memorized the text books.
In the psychometric profile, capabilities are the baseline, the table stakes for performance at work.
Add all this up and you get a psychometric profile – a picture of you that shows your skills and knowledge to date, the ways in which you behave at work and the kind of setting in which you work most comfortably. The richness of information in this profile lets us match you very precisely to specific jobs, and gives you deep insights into who you are and how you might progress your career.
The matching process, the way your distinctly-you profile is lined up against the performance-predicting requirements of individual jobs and specific careers, leads you to the best job for you, even to your dream job.
With psychometric profiling, getting your dream job involves absolutely no nightmares.
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