Is Psychometric Testing in recruitment creating disability discrimination?
The application period for summer vacation schemes has just passed, and with that, many Law students are now receiving responses from various firms on the next stages of their recruitment process. As part of the reviewing process, it is increasingly common for potential employers to use psychometric tests in order to screen candidates - according to one source, up to 75% of the Times top 100 companies in the UK utilise psychometric tests in recruitment. But are these tests inherently discriminatory against those with disabilities? Are these tests filtering out disabled applicants?
Psychometric Tests: What Are They?
Psychometric tests in recruitment are tests intended to seek objective measurements of certain skills, such as personality traits, working styles and communication. This includes aptitude tests, such as those testing verbal reasoning, or inductive and deductive reasoning skills, similar to the LNAT which students take to apply for Law degrees. It also includes tests of other skills relevant to work, such as communication styles, emotional sensitivity, and focus. The former type of test is understandably to ensure that the candidate has the working skills necessary to perform the work; the latter helps employers to evaluate if the applicant would be a good fit for the company and role.
Effect on Disabled Applicants
On the surface, one can see the benefits of using such a system to pick out candidates who appear best suited for the job – the tests appear to match the job to the personality and skillset. It can speed up the recruitment process by filtering out candidates who are not well suited for the job. In particular, since soft skills are often crucial to certain jobs and not easy to identify through CVs or even interviews, on paper, relying on these tests seems the perfect solution.
However, if one looks at these tests from the perspective of someone with a disability – ADHD, Autism, or dyslexia, just to name a few – the potential blow this can deal onto their employment chances becomes concerning. The potential disadvantage that these tests pose to disabled candidates has already been acknowledged by the UK courts - The Employment Appeal Tribunal found in The Government Legal Service v Brooks that the Government Legal Service, had discriminated against the Claimant, Ms Terri Brooks, who has Asperger’s Syndrome (a form of autism), under the Equality Act 2010 by having her take a multiple-choice psychometric test which her disability made difficult to answer. Under the Equality Act, disabled people are protected from direct and indirect discrimination by employers; this case demonstrates that employers who fail to make suitable accommodations in administering psychometric tests in the process of recruitment will be liable for indirect discrimination.
In addition to this, one must consider that the skills being tested may be inherently affected by disabilities. For example, for someone with autism, tests which examine one’s social skills or ability to distinguish tone in written communication would directly target the skills affected by their disability. Similarly, tests which measure one’s attention span and short-term memory would disadvantage a candidate with ADHD. While accommodations could be made, the test itself inherently asks disabled applicants to put their areas of impairment up to be objectively measured against other candidates, creating an undeniable disadvantage.
The Issue With Online Testing
As shown above, utilising these tests opens employers up to potential liability for disability discrimination. However, in practice, this has not seemed to have prevented employers from using these tests, with very little official enforcement against possible discrimination if applicants do not take independent action. Furthermore, with a greater reliance on technology and online assessments, these tests are increasingly conducted online, through external hosts which specialise in testing.
This raises some serious potential implications; speaking purely anecdotally, the tests often do not allow the option of disability accommodations such as extra time, particular font sizes, or screen adjustment. It is understandably difficult to anticipate the full range of accommodations which would be required in the medium of an online test, and possibly costly to implement them as part of the coding for an automated online test. But this leaves these tests with very little in the way of flexibility in accommodating disabilities, thus continuing the discriminatory practices. In addition, as mentioned above, these tests often directly target skills which are affected by disabilities, such as spelling ability, reading speed, attention span and ability to read social cues.
If companies are outsourcing their testing to external vendors, this creates a difficult situation for both the employer and potential employee. Even if one discloses their disability in their application, if the psychometric test is administered externally, there is no guarantee that the effect of one’s disability on their final score would be at all considered in the results. It is possible that the external vendor would simply deliver the results to the employer without caveat, where the connection between certain results and one’s reported disability is never made. For employers, this could then run the risk of inadvertent disability discrimination as disabled applicants would be disproportionately filtered out during the recruitment process.
The current standing solution to this is in diversity quotas and targets which companies are obliged to meet, but this is clearly an imperfect solution. Possibly, the only real solution would be to ensure that the tests utilised allow for suitable accommodations, or to eliminate the testing methods which would disadvantage disabled applicants.
