A career placement test can strike fear into the heart of even the most confident employee.  Think of the TV show, The Apprentice and you start to think about the extremes of career placement tests, but there are various career tests now in regular use.  But many job candidates are unaware of why these tests are used.

The main purpose behind a career placement test is to assess your suitability for a position.  It may well be that your qualifications are excellent and that you outshine all the other candidates on paper, but when you are in the ‘real world’, how do you cope then?  This can be assessed using the placement test.

Employers are becoming ever more choosy as more and more well qualified candidates are trying for fewer and fewer jobs.  How do you sort out who is really good and who isn’t?

Employers are also keen to assess qualities that often cannot be qualified at an interview alone.  How do you cope with stress and pressure?  Are you emotionally intelligent as well as academically intelligent?  How can you relate to people?  Are you a member of a team?  Are you trustworthy?

All these questions can be answered with a career placement test, but they cannot really be assessed by employers in any other way.  People will always say that they cope well with pressure, that they are hard working and trustworthy, a real ‘team player’ etc, yet in reality they may be out purely for themselves and about as trustworthy as a snake, hence the need for a career placement test.

These tests are also beneficial to candidates because they allow candidates an insight into what the job is really like.  Then they can decide if they want the job, or if it really is not as good as it was advertised as.  So they can benefit the potential employee and not just the employer and as such should be viewed as a mutual assessment rather than just a one way appraisal.

Some people think that because career placement tests have been in use for a relatively long period of time, their day has come and gone and instead interview panels should be looking at more rigorous and thorough means of finding out job candidates’ qualities, rather than relying on assessment tests.

But those who wish to see the end of the career placement tests are ignoring a very important development in the employment field, namely the recession.  The recession means that unemployment is at its highest point than for decades and experts claim that the real figures of unemployed people are far higher than is declared, because so many people are now on sickness or invalidity benefit and thus are missed off the unemployment radar.

With an increase in unemployment, many employers are now finding that they are actually inundated with candidates for positions.  Almost 260 people recently applied to work as a refuse collector, which is not seen as a very enticing job: but these are tough times and people have to make ends meet.

Employers can only use the best possible methods to ascertain who is the best candidate for a position and so they will continue to use career placement tests, since they can sort out people who are just great at verbally selling themselves and those who can actually do the job!  When there are far too many candidates for a position, having career placements tests sometimes helps rid people who aren’t that interested: they are told that a test will be part of the interview, so they withdraw from the interview process.

Thus the demise of career placement tests does not look imminent and it is likely that those of us who are applying for jobs will have to undertake the dreaded tests for some time to come.