If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Abraham Maslow*
It’s a great quote, which is especially appropriate to personality and ability testing.
You see, reliability and validity really matter when deciding which psychometric test to use.
Poor reliability is a bit like having bathroom scales which give different readings each time under the same conditions. They are random and you can’t trust them to be accurate.
Validity, in simple terms, is about relevance – whether a test looks right, feels right and really measures what it claims to measure. Or perhaps what it is claimed that it will measure.
And that’s why it is really important to consider a range of psychometric tests for areas such as leadership development – because if you only have the one tool at your disposal then everything starts to look like a nail.
* Also attributed to Mark Twain and Abraham Kaplan – go figure!