Human Resources
Test potential employees
How PsyMax’s Wayne Nemeroff uses psychological assessments to help recruit talent
By Mike Cottrill
Smart Business Cleveland | August 2007
You can learn plenty about a job candidate’s potential from an interview, but you
can’t learn everything. With studies showing that a bad hire can cost a company 150
percent of the terminated employee’s annual salary, psychological testing to ensure
that a potential employee truly is a good fit is becoming a common human resources
tactic.
One company, PsyMax Solutions LLC, administers the Work Style Assessment test,
an online assessment tool that can be used to help fuel the employee selection and
development processes.
PsyMax CEO Wayne Nemeroff, who has a Ph.D. in industrial and organizational psychology, says that these tests can make the hiring process roughly 25 percent more efficient by working in tandem with interviews to ensure you’re not buying a bill of goods.
“The interviewing process tends not to be as accurate as more objective assessment
testing, and what the assessment enables you to do is add a layer of objectivity and
quantitative assessment,” Nemeroff says. “Instead of saying, ‘I think this person looks
like the right person,’ you would be able to measure if the person has particular competencies or qualities or characteristics that are important for that job.”
Psychological testing can also help define traits in existing staff members to develop
improvement strategies to employees and outline coaching strategies for managers.
“Putting a mirror in front of somebody and letting them take a snapshot of themselves and their assets and liabilities is being used more and more,” Nemeroff says of
the employee development processes that PsyMax uses. “Even very good managers
and leaders don’t always know how to articulate specific actions. They can say, ‘You’re
not a good listener, but they can’t specifically say, ‘Here are some things you can do to
improve your listening skills.’ One of the main reasons that people leave jobs is they
don’t believe that the company believes in their development. By using this assessment, you get the maximum by using information for development, and then coaching
accordingly.”
HOW TO REACH: PsyMax Solutions LLC, (866) 774-2273 or www.psymaxsolutions.com
