candidate support

Congratulations on reaching this stage in the selection or development process.

The information you provide though assessments is not the be-all-and-end-all but is designed to provide helpful information to inform decisions about your fit with a proposed role. This can include information about your strengths, development areas, style and potential. The assessments are scientifically developed and are interpreted by trained professionals to provide information that can help to maximize your potential in future career steps.

Other information such as examples you give about your previous performance as well as information from reference checking or other sources also helps to provide a clearer picture about where your strengths and development areas may lie.

Despite that, we recognise that you may have a lot riding on the results of the assessment. We are here to help you create a situation where you can perform at your best, so please read the information below and feel that you can contact us at anytime.

What can you do to prepare?

accelerateOD stock thousands of assessments and while the email invitation you receive from us should provide information about relevant practice tests, the following information may be helpful.

The main types of psychometric assessments used are personality and/or reasoning assessments.

Personality assessments provide information about how you may typically behave or approach your work. There are no right or wrong answers and there is usually no time limit, but you should work quickly through the questions and ‘go with your gut instinct’. You may find that there are multiple questions that seem to ask the same thing – this reflects the complexity of personality in that generally constructs cannot be measured accurately with only a single question.

Reasoning assessments are usually timed and measure your ability to reason with various types of information such as:

• Verbal – usually responding to multiple questions about whether information contained in a written passage is true, false or ‘cannot say’. In preparation you may find it beneficial to do crosswords or to give and check the meaning of difficult passages.
• Numerical – usually responding to multiple questions about whether information contained in a tables, graphs and other formats is true, false or ‘cannot say’. A calculator and scrap paper can be helpful as can brushing up on your math including subtraction, addition, multiplication, division, percentages, ratios, fractions and decimals e.g., practice dividing currency.
• Abstract – usually this assessment is made up of a series of 'shapes’ and looks at your ability to see patterns. This can shed light on your approach to learning and problem solving.

Some practice assessment from various suppliers are included below. However, please refer to your emailed invitation for practice assessments relevant to you and bear in mind that example questions may not necessarily reflect the level of difficulty of the actual test questions.

• http://www.shldirect.com/en/practice-tests/
• http://www.opragroup.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=130&Itemid=61
• http://www.practicetests.co.uk/
• For more, try googling ‘psychometric assessment’
• Contact accelerateod@accelerateod.com if you need more help

Before your complete the assessments arrange an environment free from distraction including phone calls and well meaning friends or family – especially if you are completing timed tests. Ensure you allow plenty of time and try to relax and create ‘head space’. After looking at the practice assessments, often people find the best time to complete is early morning rather than late at night after a long days work. Usually you don’t have to complete all of the assessments at once. We do encourage you to complete the personality assessment as a soon as possible so that our report writers can begin to interpret your results – this usually takes us few hours.

Try and complete as much as you can as accurately as you can but don’t panic if you haven’t finished answering all the questions before time runs out. Many people do not answer every question and can still get good results.

The assessments are designed to be difficult, so if you feel you haven’t done well, try not to dwell. Try and stay in a positive mindset for the remaining assessments. Your results are compared against other individuals who have completed the same assessment, so might have done better than you think you did. Again, remember that the assessments are just one part of the selection process.

How did you go?

We encourage you to make use of the opportunity for verbal feedback on your results. This may help with planning you own career and development

Contact| accelerateod@accelerateod.com | 0211806413 (+64211806413)