Wamly can send psychometric assessments to candidates as part of a project, helping you measure personality, cognitive ability, and motivation, and match candidates to a role profile. This article explains how psychometric assessments are set up, the assessment and report types available, how results appear and can be filtered, what each status means, and how deadlines, reminders, billing, and permissions work.

Assessments are delivered through a third-party vendor’s assessment platform. Candidates complete their assessments on that platform, and Wamly retrieves the results automatically.

Enabling psychometric assessments

For your organisation

Psychometrics are switched on for an organisation by Wamly as an internal setup step; it cannot be enabled by a client. As part of this setup, your organisation is created on the vendor’s platform, your competency profiles are configured, the vendor account is linked to your Wamly subscription, and your psychometric credits are loaded.

On a project

Psychometrics is the sixth tab in the project creation journey and in Project Settings. When you first open the tab, you see a single “Enable Psychometric Assessment” toggle, which is off by default. Turning it on lets you configure the assessment for that project.

You first choose a report type — Job Fit, Potential Profile, or Cognitive Abilities. Selecting one opens its configuration settings, and you can use “Reset Selection” at any time to return to the three options.

Job Fit requires you to complete the following settings:

• Cognitive Assessment Level — either “General – NQF 4–6” or “Academic – NQF 7–10”. Only one can be selected, and General is the default for a new project.
• Competency Profile Comparison — the profile to match candidates against, drawn from the profiles configured for your organisation. Contact Wamly if you need additional profiles.
• Sales Potential Index — whether a Sales Potential Index report and result are generated for each candidate. On by default.
• Management Potential Index — whether a Management Potential Index report and result are generated for each candidate. On by default.
• Include Learning Agility Section — on by default.
• Include Social Desirability Section — on by default.
• Norm Comparison — the norm group candidates are compared against, either “South Africa” or “International”. South Africa is the default.
• Send Feedback Report — whether a feedback report is made available to the candidate after they complete the Behavioural Competence assessment. On by default.

Potential Profile uses all the same settings as Job Fit, except for the Cognitive Assessment Level. Cognitive Abilities uses only the Intelligence Level and Norm Comparison settings. A single Norm Comparison applies to all assessments on the project.

Enabling psychometric assessments on a project automatically adds a mandatory Gender field to the application form. The Psychometrics tab only appears in the Table View of the Project View once psychometrics are enabled on the project or at least one assessment has been sent to a candidate.

Assessment types

The assessment measures personality, cognitive ability, and motivation, and produces a “fit score” that matches a candidate to a role profile across behaviour, abilities, and overall fit. Additional scores are available for Management Potential, Sales Potential, and Learning Agility.

The core assessment types are:

• Behavioural Competence
• Motivations
• Cognitive Ability, which is offered at two levels — an Academic level assessment and a General level assessment.

All assessments are scored against norm groups.

Reports and results

The following report and result types are available:

• VIT — Cognitive Ability.
• Potential Profile — Behavioural Competence and Motivations.
• Select — the same sections as Potential Profile plus VIT, with interview questions included.
• Match Score / General Potential.
• Learning Agility.
• Social Desirability.
• Sales Potential Index (SPI).
• Management Potential Index (MPI).
• TalentGO — the candidate feedback report.

The job fit score (match score) is derived from the competency and cognitive ability scores. Learning Agility is not included in the job fit calculation.

Psychometric Merit List report

The Psychometric Merit List is one of two project report types (the other being the Full Project Report). All project reports are produced in Microsoft Excel format and reflect only the data available at the time the report was generated. The Psychometric Merit List is available only if psychometrics are activated on the project.

Project information (the report type and project name) appears at the top, followed by the candidate data. Columns are grouped into up to nine sections:

• Candidate Details — the sort-order number (starting from 1), first name, last name, and email.
• Overall Scores — Job Fit Score, Behavioural Competence, Cognitive Abilities, and Learning Agility, depending on which assessments the candidate completed. A Job Fit Score is always present; the others may not be.
• Profiled Behavioural Competencies — only the 6–10 competencies selected in the competency profile, sorted in the order they appear in the vendor’s competency framework. Omitted if the personality test was not completed.
• Cognitive Abilities — Logical, Verbal, Mathematical, and Numerical scores, depending on which can be derived. Omitted if the cognitive ability test was not completed.
• Overall Learning Agility — all Learning Agility sub-scores (Change, Mental, People, Results, Self-awareness). Omitted if Learning Agility was not included, or if the personality and motivations assessments were not completed.
• Social Desirability — Impression Management and Self-Deception. Omitted if the personality assessment was not completed.
• Other Behavioural Competencies — the remaining competencies not profiled for the role, sorted in the order they appear in the vendor’s competency framework. Omitted if the personality test was not completed.
• Workplace Motivators — the 20 motivators assessed. Omitted if the motivations assessment was not completed.
• Preferred Team Roles — the eight team-role types derived from the motivator results. Omitted if the motivations assessment was not completed.

The report has three heading rows below the project details before the results begin: the first lists the sections, the second describes each section, and the third names the competencies, abilities, and motivators measured.

Scores are colour-coded to aid interpretation: 7–9 are shaded in greens (9 darkest) and 1–3 in reds (1 darkest). Social Desirability is the exception, where 1 is dark green, 2 is light red, and 3 is dark red.

The merit list excludes any candidate who has not completed a psychometric assessment, even where many other candidates are in the project, and lists candidates by overall fit score from highest to lowest.

Full Project Report

In both report types, filtering and sorting are pre-enabled on the lowest-level heading so you can find and organise the data directly in Excel.

Viewing and filtering psychometric data

Every rater sees a candidate’s full application profile, which includes psychometric results when they are in use. The Rater screen’s right-hand accordion contains a Psychometrics section, and its visibility depends on the user’s permissions.

When psychometrics are activated on a project, two psychometrics filters become available in the application filters:

• Psychometric Status — filter by the current status of an assessment: Success, Pending, Processing, Cancelled, Overdue, Expired, or Error.
• Psychometric Results — filter by the candidate’s match score where results have returned. The range runs from 0 to 10 (the lowest achievable score is 1 and the highest is 9), and the slider moves in increments of 0.1 because the score can include a decimal.

Assessment statuses

A candidate’s psychometric assessment can hold one of the following statuses: Success, Pending, Processing, Cancelled, Overdue, Expired, and Error. Two have specific behaviours worth noting:

• Processing — an assessment only enters Processing when an assessment that was already sent is being re-mapped, whether or not the results have returned.
• Expired — candidates cannot log in to the vendor’s assessment platform after 21 days, so any assessment not completed within 21 days of being sent is automatically marked Expired. When an assessment is marked Expired, the credits used for it are refunded to your organisation.

Sending assessments, deadlines, and reminders

From a candidate’s actions menu you can Send Psych Assessment, Send Psych Reminder, and Cancel Psych Assessment. These actions can be performed on a single candidate or on several candidates at once.

The assessment deadline you choose when sending is separate from the project end date and does not actually lock the candidate out. It is simply the date communicated to the candidate, while the completion link remains usable for up to 21 days after it is first sent. Once the chosen deadline passes, Wamly shows the assessment as Expired, and if you send a reminder to a candidate whose deadline has passed, the system warns you that the deadline has been exceeded but that the assessment can still be completed. A candidate can complete an assessment after the stated deadline as long as they are within the 21-day window; in that case the assessment continues to show as Expired until you manually refresh the psych results.

If an assessment has been sent but not yet completed, cancelling it in Wamly refunds the credits used for it.

When results appear

Wamly retrieves psychometric scores from the third-party vendor at 13 minutes past every hour. Because there is no real-time push when a candidate finishes, a result can be up to 59 minutes behind — for example, an assessment completed at 23:25 is first checked at 00:13 the next morning. When a large volume of candidate data is being transferred, an individual candidate’s results may appear up to roughly 30 minutes after the fetch begins, as it can take that long to retrieve all the data from the vendor.

Billing and credits

Psychometric assessments are paid for using psychometric credits, which are loaded to your organisation as part of the subscription setup. Credits are refunded when an assessment that was sent but not completed is cancelled, and when an assessment is automatically marked Expired.

User permissions

Psychometrics permissions can be set per user. For each user you can control whether they may view results, view reports, and trigger transactions. Within the view-results permission, you can also choose specifically whether the user is allowed to see Social Desirability scores.

Plan availability

Psychometric assessments are available on all plans, with payment options and provider choice varying by tier:

Enterprise clients can choose to integrate the assessment vendor using their own API key.

Related candidate experience

“Psychometrics” is also a stage category, used when a candidate is completing a psychometric assessment. Candidates receive psychometric invitation and reminder emails and complete their assessments on the vendor’s platform. A “Psychometric Assessment Status Update” event is available for webhooks, allowing assessment status changes to be sent to connected systems.