I had to take a psychometric test yesterday as part of a application process for a mega company. During the test I kept wondering why the bother to take the effort to do a test. Isn’t a degree more than enough or experience in a professional field enough? I guess not. Big companies love putting their wanna-be-employees through such gruelling tests to determine that they are in fact of the right attitude and mind for the company.

Having done a year of psychology and came out of that with the fact that IQ tests cannot test intelligence. So with this thought in mind, I prepared for the psychometric test. Google psychometric test and you can find dozens of sample test but none of them really match up to what the real thing is. I did a sample Quantas test which was very very similar to the real psychometric test.

There are 4 main components to the psychometric test I undertook – the personality, the verbal, the numerical and the diagrammatic. The personality test is choosing a scale from Strongly Disagree to Strongly Agree on a statement they put forward. This is meant to give them personality character build to ensure that they aren’t hiring depressed, lazy people. Seriously, a statement such as “I am constantly depressed” makes me wonder who in their right mind going for a job would put Strongly Agree? Well people do sometimes amaze you…

The next part is the Critical Reasoning test. First was the verbal test where you are given a passage, they give you a statement and you have to judge whether it is true, not true or unable to say depending on the passage. I had to read some of the questions twice because the way that they worded the statement is misleading. I nearly ran out of time for this one since I had to answer the questions in 19 mins.

Next was the numerical test which I found the most difficult. I have not done any difficult maths equation except for adding and subtracting since I graduated from high school – 3 years ago! The questions are anything but straight forward, and your mind is left to think of a way to answer the question. I ran out of time and guessed the last few questions.

Next was the diagrammatic and spatial test where you are given a set of diagrams and you have to determine the next diagram. This is what I excel at the most – probably because we are female and love deducing things. I did this test with over 5 mins left to spare.

Overall, I was not completely confident with the result, but then I get invited to the next round so something must have gone right, or it must have been my lucky day!