Assessments, Selections, Development
Candidate testing
BOJANA ĐURIĆ, SC.D.
Project Director
Tel: (00 381) 65 870 59 87
E-mail: bojana.djuric@profil-group.rs
Psychological assessments are now an indispensable part of staff selection and development in companies, and this is by no means a coincidence.
We are usually contacted by companies with requirements such as to evaluate a person’s leadership potential, what should be done to develop one’s sales skills to the maximum, what should be done to develop one’s communication skills and employee motivating skills as much as possible, and psychology is a science that gives the right answers to these questions. Its goal is to direct and support the development of people that always starts from an adequate assessment.
An adequate psychological assessment is primarily the one that is complete. This means that it is an assessment that respects a basic psychological fact: that people are complex and complete beings, that is, that any dimension that is measured by a test or instrument is observed in the context of the whole personality. For example, proactivity is nowadays a highly valued feature that is quite sought-after in business world staff.
However, if a person’s proactivity is not followed by persistence, he or she thinks ahead and is very capable of triggering new things, but is not able to finish them off. Similarly, if we are looking for a person who is characterized by systematicity, precision, and orientation to details, but we ignore whether that person has a developed ability to think strategically and to see the bigger picture – we can get a person who is too petty and fails to see the wood for the trees..
Another important thing that is often neglected but quite clear to both psychologists and people who work in practice is that same people will not be equally successful in working, for example, in Germany, France, Scandinavia, and Belgrade.
The environment is different, the people with whom he cooperates and communicates differ, and therefore different places require slightly different personality characteristics.
I work on standardization at the regional level and I can say that there are some such differences even between cities such as Podgorica and Belgrade.
In practice, this results in the use of non-locally standardized instruments, the use of foreign tests lacking local standardization, thus diminishing the value of the results and their usefulness for forecasting and for properly assessing the potential of people to work on our market.