Psychological assessment in human resource management: discrepancies between theory and practice and two examples of integration

Psychological assessment refers to the process whereby different methods and techniques are used to test hypotheses about people and their psychological characteristics. Understanding employees' psychological makeup is key to allow effective human resource management, from hiring to retirement. However, the gap between scientific evidence and organizational practices dealing with psychological assessment is still great. This paper shows the differences between research and practice, i.e. between what scientific evidence suggests to assess people from a psychological point of view reliably and what practitioners do when they want to reach the same goal. At the end of the article, two examples of integration between research and practice are presented. We discuss how methods and techniques of psychological assessment can be developed to both respect scientific criteria and meet specific organizational needs.