Psychometric Assessments: Ensuring Nothing Slips Through the Cracks

If you’ve worked in HR or have been through a recruitment process in the last five years, chances are you’ve come across a psychometric assessment of some sort. It’s said that 78% of recruiters consider psychometric assessments to be a powerful tool for hiring.

A psychometric test is an assessment tool for gauging mental ability, personality, or work behavior and how it relates to a candidate’s potential to excel in a specific role.

While these tests are ideal for measuring and assessing candidates’ personalities, reasoning abilities, probable behavioral responses to different scenarios, and their likelihood of fitting in with the company culture, they are not without their setbacks.

When used correctly, psychometrics can benefit your company. However, poor use of these tools can ruin the effectiveness of your hiring strategy and cost you money and time, especially when you need to adapt your assessment tools to accommodate a global hiring process.

Check out some of the sore points around psychometrics and how Argos Multilingual helps its customers overcome and optimize their assessments globally to produce the best results in every language.

Convey the Right Meaning

It’s crucial to ensure your assessments convey the meaning you want to have, to ensure the accuracy of the assessment outcome. On a global scale, this means ensuring the translated versions also convey this intended meaning.

How can you accomplish that?

With some of our clients, we follow two processes:

Dual-forward translation: This process involves two independent translators working from the same source text. An editor then reconciles the two translated texts to provide one final version. This ensures you get the best translation while retaining the meaning in the target language as best as possible.

Back translation: This process involves translating the English source text into the target language and then translating it back into English. When we do this with our clients, we make sure to add a third step of checking the final English output against the source text, liaising with our clients where any adjustments are necessary.

Psychometric Assessment Validation

Properly validated tests usually return reliable results, but how does one guarantee that the output of an assessment is accurate?

With one of our clients, the best practice is to validate the translated content in each target language by testing it on 200 participants across different local markets. Once the feedback is gathered, the client compares the results between the English version and the translated versions. If the results are not similar, the translations are adjusted based on the summaries of the validation process.

Make sure you pick a translation and localization partner that provides clients with the extra QA (Quality Assurance) levels they require. Whether it’s dual-forward, back translating, or testing phases of translations and source text, we assemble the quality checking steps our clients need to ensure their psychometric assessments convey the intended meaning and are effective across markets.

Localization vs. Translation

Once assessments are finalized, have your linguists follow the path the intended candidates are expected to take during the evaluation. By doing this, linguists may notice any mistakes, like pieces of text that have been accurately translated, but not localized well, or may be misleading in the final context.

Things like brand names, colloquialisms, and currencies may be foreign to certain candidates. Moreover, diversity and gender inclusivity must be considered when localizing content. In some markets, this is more important than in others, and paying attention to this detail makes all the difference to candidates.

Subject Matter Expert Linguists

For this kind of translation, where a single word can skew your assessment results, it’s more than just translating content into target languages, particularly when it comes to HR and recruitment. You need linguists with subject matter expertise in HR terminology, which ensures a granular type of focus when translating this type of content. Their deeper understanding and first-hand experience of the associated language and industry-specific terms mean less risk of making mistakes other linguists might.

Technical Engineering & Media Types

Tools and file types are other aspects you do not want to overlook when you need to roll out assessments in different languages. For example, often, our clients upload their source text in a JSON file type. We translate the source text into the target languages while ensuring the final file formatting matches the source, and that tags and placeholders are maintained, so that the translated content can be easily uploaded.

For some clients, the expectation for the final product can span a variety of media types, including VR and/or videos that require voiceovers, closed captions, or subtitles. Take this into consideration when you are choosing a language partner or taking on the project yourself. 

Do you use psychometric assessments in your company when recruiting new employees and want to optimize the process for all your markets? Are you a provider of psychometric assessments or assessment technology? We would be happy to discuss your project and how Argos can take away the pain of translating your assessments into multiple languages. Connect with Argos today to see how we can help.