Ability test
Designed to assess logical reasoning or thinking performance.
Behavioural assessment
A behavioural assessment indicates how people are likely to approach problems, interact with others and respond to the pace of the environment and its rules and procedures.
Behaviour based interview questions
Questions designed to discover how the candidate acted in specific employment-related situations. The logical idea is that past performance predicts future performance.
Behaviour patterns
A recurrent way of acting by an individual or group toward a given object or in a given situation.
Behavioural requirements
Defines the behaviours needed to perform successfully in a role.
This process is used to evaluate various aspects of organisational procedures. This then allows companies to develop plans on how to make improvements or adapt specific best practices, usually with the aim of increasing some aspect of performance. Interestingly the term benchmarking was first used by cobblers to measure people’s feet for shoes. They would place someone’s foot on a “bench” and mark it out to make the pattern for the shoes.
Character
The features and traits that form an individual person.
Internal Benchmark
The process of making meaningful comparisons between the performance of a company and the performance of identified best practices. This often becomes the standard for continued improvement used by employees for more effective ways to get the job done.
Interview structure
The degree to which the interviewer controls, directs, and shapes the verbal interchange between the two protagonists. This involves regulating the length, focus, and depth of the interviewee’s discourse as well as imposing limits and direction through the interviewer’s questions and interventions.
The McQuaig Institute was founded over 40 years ago by Canadian Industrial Psychologist Jack McQuaig. Using behavioural interviews and psychological tests he discovered that people rarely fail due to lack of skills or intelligence. Instead, their success is due to elements of personality and temperament. To measure these elements McQuaig developed the tests and processes that make up the McQuaig Psychometric System™.
McQuaig Job Fit Interview Guide
The McQuaig Job Fit Interview Guide is a practical report to help managers conduct better interviews.
The McQuaig Job Survey® is an objective measure of the hiring manager’s behavioural design for any given job.
The McQuaig Mental Agility Test® (formerly McQuaig Occupational Test®)
The McQuaig Mental Agility Test® (formerly McQuaig Occupational Test®) is a mental agility test used to assess the power and speed of general intelligence.
McQuaig Online® is the web-based assessment system that allows you to do assessments on-line quickly and efficiently.
McQuaig Word Surveys®, McQuaig Job Surveys® and McQuaig Self-Development Surveys® can be completed by candidates, current employees or managers on-line.
All Surveys are processed on a high-speed, secure server.
The McQuaig Psychometric System
The McQuaig Psychoemetric System is a system of psychometric assessments developed by The McQuaig Institute of Executive Development in Toronto and principally comprises The McQuaig Word Survey®, The McQuaig Job Survey® and The McQuaig Occupational Test®.
The McQuaig Self Development Survey™
The McQuaig Self Development Survey™ is a self-development plan and coaching tool of up to 30 pages. This report identifies and optimises an individual’s strengths and helps manage development areas that may decrease their personal effectiveness.
The McQuaig Word Survey®
The McQuaig Word Survey® (WS) is a measure of four personality domains that capture core aspects of the widely established “big five” personality factors. It is organised into 21 word sets, each consisting of four descriptors (a tetrad) – one from each of the four personality domains. Respondents rank order the trait-descriptors within each of the 21 sets based on the degree to which they are self-descriptive. WS interpretations and recommendations are based on seven basic profile patterns and their subsets.
Mental agility
Indicates the ability of an individual to think, learn and quickly absorb new information, systems and processes. It assesses vocabulary, verbal reasoning skills and the ability to perform simple mathematical functions.
Occupational assessment
To examine the skills, knowledge and abilities required for affected occupational groups. Occupational assessment identifies how and which occupational discrepancies or gaps exist.
Occupational psychologist
Occupational psychologists apply psychological knowledge, theory and practice to the world of work. They aim to help an organisation get the best performance from their employees and also to improve employees’ own job satisfaction.
Online psychometrics
Psychometric tests are delivered online using dedicated services such as McQuaig Online.
Occupational test
A standardised test to give objective information to identify if someone has the right skills needed to do a job.
Personality profiling
There are many definitions of personality. If we take the Wikipedia definition that: ‘In psychology, personality describes the character of emotion, thought, and behaviour patterns unique to a person. There are several theoretical perspectives on personality in psychology, which involve different ideas about the relationship between personality and other psychological constructs, as well as different theories about the way personality develops.’ we can immediately see that the word ‘personality’ is probably construed in a variety of ways depending on the definitions held by an individual.
Personality profiling tool
The McQuaig Psychometric System is made up of six tools including the McQuaig Job, Word, and Self Development Survey™.
Personality tests
A personality test is a questionnaire or other standard instrument designed to reveal aspects of an individual’s character or psychological makeup. The first personality tests were developed in the early 20th century and were intended to ease the process of personnel selection, particularly in the armed forces. Today, personality tests are used in a range of contexts, including individual and relationship counselling, career planning and employee selection and development.
Personality traits
A fairly permanent aspect of your personality which colours the way you interpret what goes on around you. In psychology, Trait theory is a major approach to the study of human personality. Trait theorists are primarily interested in the measurement of traits, which can be defined as habitual patterns of behaviour, thought, and emotion.
Psychometrics
Psychometrics is the field of study concerned with the theory and technique of psychological measurement. It includes the measurement of knowledge, abilities, attitudes, personality traits and educational measurement. The field is primarily concerned with the construction and validation of measurement instruments such as questionnaires, traits and personality assessments.
It involves two major research tasks, namely: (i) the construction of instruments and procedures for measurement; and (ii) the development and refinement of theoretical approaches to measurement.
Psychometric testing
‘Psychometric’ simply means ‘measuring the mind’ and comes from the Greek ‘psyche’ meaning mind, and ‘metron’ meaning to measure. Psychometric testing can include a wide range of skills, abilities or other factors such as interests, attitudes and personality, but may also extend to other clinical testing outside the commercial environment.
Psychometric reports
Describe the core aspects of the individual’s personality factors.
Psychometric validity
The results of any psychometric assessment have meaning (validity) only in the context of he construct they purport to assess.
Recruitment
According to Edwin B. Flippo, “Recruitment is the process of searching for candidates to employ and stimulating them to apply for jobs in the organisation”. It is the activity that links the employers and the job seekers.
Recruitment and selection
Refers to the chain and sequence of activities pertaining to recruitment and selection of employable candidates and job seekers for an organisation.
Sample reports
A document that presents unbiased information in an organised format for a specific audience and purpose.
Speed of thought
Defined as the capacity to quickly work through complex information.
Technical information
Information, including scientific information, that relates to research, development, engineering, test, evaluation, production, operation and use.
Temperament
Features of your personality that are present at birth and have a genetic/biological basis. Your temperament, or basic disposition, interacts with environmental influences to create your personality.
The validity of any assessment system depends upon it having been properly tested against a wide variety of benchmarks. The better commercially available psychometric tests will have available technical manuals detailing studies to measure, amongst other issues the robustness of the structure of the system, its validity in a variety of settings, and its fairness in terms of social justice and discrimination. For further details of the validity of assessments offered by The McQuaig Psychometric System, please click here.
