Psychometric tests help employers find and choose the right candidates for better employee performance and retention. Translating and adapting them allows employers to more easily build the truly global workforce they need.

Human resources decisions aren’t easy. Employee turnover and hiring the wrong candidates cost companies time and money that could be better spent elsewhere. But when used in conjunction with traditional hiring methods like interviews, psychometric tests take a lot of the subjectiveness and guesswork out of the recruitment and selection process and allow companies to focus more on their core business instead.

Psychometric tests can help employers measure candidates’ strengths, intelligence, abilities, personality and/or suitability for the role, which an interview may not be able to adequately capture. These test results allow employers to easily and objectively compare candidates and make more informed hiring decisions. Studies show that these more scientific methods lead to better employee performance and employee retention.

However, once tests that produce great results here at home are implemented, it may be tempting to export them to overseas operations as is. But when it comes to finding and hiring the right people, English-only, US-centric assessments aren’t the way to go, even if employees and candidates also speak English. The key to most effectively building the best and truly global workforce is the translation and adaptation of a company’s psychometric tests.

After all, a rose is not a rose in every language, in every culture and in every context. Given what psychometric tests are designed to do and what employers are looking to them for, it’s important to ensure a fair test that measures candidates’ responses in the right way. And that’s what adaptation does. It helps ensure that every question and every test are culturally appropriate, relevant and meaningful to the target audience.

Just like every candidate who applies for an open position won’t be a great fit, not every translator or translation company is suited to tackling the Everest of a psychometric test. In fact, translating and adapting a psychometric test requires very specific expertise and experience in order to create a conceptually, semantically, pragmatically and culturally equivalent instrument. This is why every test translation and adaptation project Responsive Translation undertakes is a team effort joined by our psychometricians, subject matter experts, translators, editors and project managers.

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Test Translation and Adaptation

Certified for ISO 9001, Responsive Translation specializes in high-stakes translation, adaptation, validation and review for tests, assessments and surveys, including for employee recruitment and selection. To learn more about our range of foreign-language services and how we can help your organization, please get in touch at 646-847-3309 or [email protected].