“A Coffee with Palmerston North Personnel” a short and sweet series of coffee meetings with Manawatu Business Managers / Owners and Palmerston North Personnel. 

Today we are glad to meet Sarah Yee and clarify some of the mystery behind Psychology, the tools in use and its relevance to Recruiting in Manawatu.

Sarah Yee  Organisational  Psychologist from OPRA GROUP.

 

Who are OPRA?

OPRA is a specialist team of organisational psychologists and consultants. We have offices in Wellington, Auckland, and Christchurch. You can see us online at www.opragroup.com. You can also read Sarah's blogs at http://oprablog.wordpress.com/author/sarahyee/

 

What does your business do? How do you do it?

We are probably most well-known as a provider of psychometric assessments - just like those used by Palmerston North Personnel. Click Here to see those tools.   What some people aren’t aware of is that our work is much broader than just psychometric assessments. We also provide HR consulting, surveying (e.g. 360 feedback, culture and exit), training, and development services. We work in partnership with our clients to provide expert advice and human resource solutions that are both practical and supported by research. 

 

What is your role as an Organisational Psychologist?

Organisational Psychology focuses on better understanding organisations and how they work, so that we can identify ways to improve performance and the wellbeing of employees. We look at all stages of the employee life cycle, and help organisations to recruit and select the right people, enhance employee performance, and understand/improve their culture to perform better as a whole.

 

What are psychometrics?

Psychometric literally translates to measurement of the mind (psycho = mind, metric = measurement). Psychometric assessments are a standardised way of looking at an individual’s mental ability and their personal preferences. 

 

What is the relevance of Psychometrics when recruiting staff? Why should Manawatu businesses use Psychometric Services?

Psychometrics are extremely useful in selection and development because they provide us with an objective way of identifying someone’s potential and likely performance, to determine whether or not they are a good fit with a particular role.

 

I guess if I had to make a statement here it would be that rather than Manawatu Businesses seeing psychometrics exclusively in recruitment and decision making - I would like businesses to see Psychometrics as strategic tools for people management and development. Beyond selection, they also provide valuable information that can be used to manage and motivate employees, identify potential for career progression, increase self awareness to facilitate team development and communication, and understand what differentiates between high and low performers. 

 

Palmerston North Personnel provide OPRA Psychometric Services to our clients through Claire Frame our internal Psychometric expert – our clients find the current profiles and reports very useful and helpful. 

What are the most regular or frequently used psychometric assessments? Are they used exclusively for executive placements – how are they being used most effectively?

The assessments we would see used most often would be ability assessments and general personality assessments. But there are also many specialist assessments available, like the occupational interests assessment that Claire uses for career coaching and outplacement. See the range of assessments here.

 

Psychometric assessments can be used for executive placements and they often are, but definitely not exclusively.  Our clients use them at all levels. In terms of being used most effectively, it is great to see some of our clients linking personal preferences back to their competency models and values, using profiles to help develop interview and reference checking questions, and as a way of understanding how to best manage new employees and keep them engaged.

 

OPRA itself is a consultancy service – how much impact do your staff have on your business?  What assessments do your staff go through and why those assessments?

Our staff are key to our business.

We all have a background in Organisational Psychology, so we share the same passion for what we do.  Team work is really important to us so we work very hard at that. We do regular culture surveys and 360 degree feedback as a team, to ensure we are all on the same page and that we make the most out of each individual’s strengths.  We also put ourselves through psychometric assessments for our own learning and development. For example, in the Wellington office recently, we talked through our personality profiles as a team so we can better understand how each of us prefers to work!

 

How can you see Palmerston North Personnel (in partnership with OPRA) adding the most value to our Manawatu Businesses?

As a professional personnel consultancy who use OPRA tools we know you are already adding value to clients… although I was surprised how diverse your business is in Manawatu. We often find that adding Psychometric Assessments to recruitment and selection adds another layer to decision making and shows employers a well-rounded view of an employee. This layering of information with CV’s, professional interviewing, psychometrics, references, background checking, and skills assessments provide  an in-depth understanding of a job applicant.

By including objective measures like Psychometric Assessments, Palmerston North Personnel also add an impartial measure for clients to fully validate the shortlisted applicants against Palmerston North Personnel’s  recommendations.

 

What recommendations or advice would you have for anyone using Psychometric Assessments?

The best advice I could give to candidates completing Psychometric Assessments is to remember that it is just one part of the process, and give it your best shot. Don’t be alarmed if you walk away feeling as though it was tough – they aren’t designed to be easy! Have a look at the practice questions and make sure you get a decent sleep the night before so that you can complete the assessments being as fresh as possible. Most of all, be honest with yourself.  Remember that personality assessments are about fit, they help match people to the right role, there are no right or wrong answers!

 

For organisations using Psychometric Assessments, make sure that candidates are aware they will be completing an assessment and why, this can help to minimise candidate anxiety. Seek advice from local providers like Palmerston North Personnel, with in-house experts like Claire Frame to help you identify which assessments will work best for your organisation.

 

What are the trends in Psychometrics… are there any advancements or new initiatives we should know about?

Psychometric Assessments are such a valuable tool and I think that we will see more and more organisations recognising this over time. I think that one the most likely advancements will be the increased use of Adaptive Testing. 

 

Adaptive Assessments tailor the questions to the candidate’s level, as questions are selected from a large pool of questions, based on previous responses.  Adaptive Assessments allow you to assess ability with a high degree of accuracy in a short space of time, and improve the candidate experience because respondents are not continually presented with questions that are too easy or too difficult for them.

 

I also think that with the convenience of remote testing and as more people see the benefits of psychometrics, we are likely to see online testing capability improve.

 

In Summary:

Sarah Yee was very interesting to meet and the topic was fascinating, we discussed the broader use of psychometrics and it was obvious that Sarah is passionate about the insights to be drawn from Psychomotrics, 360 degree surveys and developmental tools.
And it was especially pleasing to see that Sarah endorsed the quality and depth of Claire Frame's work with the OPRA tools - you can see the range of the tools Palmerston North Personnel support  RIGHT HERE

We have seen Manawatu businesses surprise at the affordabilty, depth and quality of our psychometric assessments. Interestingly when applicants get their feedback they are surpised at the depth of understanding too -with a regular comment being "...that's exactly me..."

I think its fair to say Psychometric Assessments with quality analysis and a full recruitment process add an extra layer of credibility and clarity when trying to make the best decision about how to hire and manage quality employees in Manawatu.   It seems there is extra value to be had in using them to develop and retain employees too.

 

The Venue:

Sarah was up from Wellington so we took the opportunity to interview Sarah at Palmerston North Personnel  53 Princess Street, Palmerston North. So naturally the coffee was sensational.

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