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Behavioural traits and characteristics are as important as qualifications and experience when it comes to recruitment. Personality and behavioural traits include thinking style, motivation level, leadership qualities and social skills to name a few. These personality traits determine the candidate’s adaptability to the company’s culture, a willingness to learn, delivering the best performance and most importantly scoring high on the employee retention scale.

Critical thinking is one of the behavioural characteristics that is valued at the workplace because of its numerous benefits. In simple words, critical thinking is making reasoned judgements. Critical thinking may also be defined as thinking that assesses itself. Critical thinking is self-directed, self-disciplined, self-monitored and self-corrective thinking.

It helps a person appreciate differing viewpoints, take a reasoned approach to any situation and make an informed choice. All of these factors ensure better communication skills and improved problem-solving capabilities. A candidate with these qualities is obviously more favoured for any position in any industry.

Traditional assessment and recruitment practices such as phone screening and/or in-person interviews don’t allow much scope to assess these qualities in the candidates. It becomes a hit-or-miss situation as far as selecting the right candidate is concerned. Recruitment being an expensive and effort and time intensive affair, it becomes quite important to have a surer method to judge a candidate’s suitability to the role in every way. In this scenario, critical thinking tests can become an important tool for recruiters to make a confident, correct and unbiased choice.

Importance of Critical Thinking in the Workplace

Let us look at some of the most important benefits of critical thinking at the workplace:

  • Acceptance of different possibilities: A person with critical thinking capabilities is aware or at least open to acceptance of the possible different approaches to any situation. He/she is also more inclined to critically analyse each of the approaches to arrive at a more favourable one. This approach gives anyone a powerful tool to handle any issue in day-to-day life, more so at work.
  • Time saver: Critical thinking gives the ability to skim through the barrage of information and pay attention only to the relevant ones. It thus, helps one prioritise time and resources, thereby saving precious time.
  • Acceptance of differing views: A person with critical thinking capabilities is open to differing views and is able to go beyond personal, cultural and other barriers to reach a consensus and decision. It endows the characteristics of empathy and understanding that is the basis of teamwork and leadership.
  • Effective communication skills: Critical thinking helps people become effective communicators as they are able to present their case with hard facts and convincing evidence. With clarity and proficiency, communication becomes effective, smooth and result oriented.
  • Enhanced decision-making capabilities: Analytical thinking and an informed approach keep guesswork at bay, resulting in better, sound decisions, which is a win-win situation for everyone.
  • Better problem-solving skills: A reasoned, balanced approach helps a person learn two types of reasoning, namely inductive and deductive and the ability to know when to use which. Basing decisions on reasoning and logic over emotions and instinct is any day a better way to approach any problem which is more likely to be effectively solved.

Considering all the aforementioned benefits of critical thinking, it is clear that an employee with these skills is an asset to any organisation and role and hence critical thinking assessments can be a game changer is selecting the appropriate candidate.

Applications of Critical Thinking Skills Tests

With the enormous benefits of critical thinking skills, it is important to employ critical thinking tests right during the selection process.

Be it campus recruitment or lateral hiring, suitable critical thinking assessments can assess these qualities in the candidates and help recruiters choose the candidates with the necessary skills. The important point to understand is critical thinking skills are not cast in stone, nor are they innate. Everyone possesses them in varying degrees, and they can definitely be taught and learned through conscious practice. Therefore, a critical thinking test should be well-designed based on a scientific approach and must suit the skill required for a particular business and role.    

Critical thinking assessments can also come in handy for workforce development. They can help identify the skill gap of the employees, helping the management come up with suitable training programs to bridge the gap. It can greatly favour the chances of improvement in employees, as well as company success.

MeritTrac Platforms for Critical Thinking Skills Tests

MeritTrac provides an end-to-end assessment solution for testing critical thinking skills of candidates. We offer everything necessary for the entire process right from the critical thinking test designing and delivering to administration, analysis and reporting. We aim to make hiring right, easy and quick. Check out our assessment platforms that make the entire process a breeze:

Pariksha

A hybrid scientific assessment platform from MeritTrac, Pariksha allows creation, designing, scheduling and delivering of critical thinking assessments. It also offers help in analysing and reporting the results making the whole process painless for the test administrators and recruiters. Some of the key features of this platform include:

  • Remote assessment delivery and invigilation with or without Internet
  • Easy integration with external tools such as test marking software
  • Highly adaptive testing features and customisable test catalogues
  • Cloud ready
  • Multi-platform
  • Mobile ready
  • Plug and play

SmartTest

SmartTest allows recruiters to screen and shortlist candidates from a crowd right away. It is suitable to be used with a wide range of assessments spanning different domains, which helps businesses become self-sufficient in the field of assessment administration. The salient features of SmartTest are:

  • Plug and play
  • Range of test catalogues allows customising critical thinking tests to suit the needs and requirements of the company
  • Superior candidate assessment analytics allow for performance benchmarking
  • Assessment administration is smooth, quick and secure

FAQ

FAQ

1. What are Critical thinking tests?

A. They assess the critical thinking capabilities of a candidate during recruitment or before a training program.

2. How do these tests prove useful?

A. A scientifically designed critical thinking assessment provides useful insights for recruiters and managers to make the right candidate selection for a role and/or position.

3. What are the skills that can be assessed using these tests?

A. Critical thinking test can help assess reasoned thinking capability, decision-making and problem-solving approach to name a few.

4. What are the USPs of MeritTrac critical thinking assessments?

The scientific nature of MeritTrac assessments allow to make a quick, informed and unbiased candidate selection. MeritTrac provides an end to end solution in assessments right from test design to evaluation and analysis. With more than 3 million successful assessments delivered to 400 clients across the world, our results speak for themselves.

5. What is the scope of MeritTrac critical thinking tests?

MeritTrac critical thinking assessments can help make the right choice of candidates who can add value to the business and make the workplace healthier and happier. In the case of existing employees, they can help identify training and development needs so they can contribute to the business growth to the best of their abilities.