Restructures are the hardest test of HR judgement. Every pressure goes in the wrong direction — time compressed, information siloed, people under stress asked to make career-defining decisions quickly. Psychometric assessments have a role here, but the role is different from the role a poorly-briefed exec might assume.
The conversation to refuse
Sometimes, in the early stages of a restructure, a senior stakeholder will ask whether psychometric assessments can be used to help decide who stays and who goes. The answer is no, and the reasons are worth being ready to explain:
- The legal framework in most jurisdictions — certainly the UK, EU, Australia — requires that redundancy selection criteria be objective, measurable, and relevant to the business need. A personality profile is not objective in the sense the legislation means. Using one would be challengeable at tribunal and expensive to defend.
- The instruments are not designed for adverse selection. They are designed to describe how a person tends to behave, compared to a norm group — not to rank suitability for continued employment.
- The signal-to-noise ratio is wrong. A personality profile will correctly identify many of the people you would want to keep and many you would want to let go. It will also misidentify a meaningful minority of each. In a normal talent decision, you catch those misidentifications in conversation. In a redundancy process, you do not get a second conversation.
Say no. Escalate if necessary. The downstream risk to the business of a badly-run selection exceeds the upstream reputational cost of refusing.
What assessments can do in a restructure
A lot, actually — just not selection. The humane uses are:
For people who are staying
- Reset team conversations. The people remaining will often have new managers, new reports, new colleagues. The working-style conversations that happened implicitly over years have to happen explicitly in weeks. Running DISC or Work Values across new team configurations, with a short debrief, compresses that.
- Surface the capability gaps you now own. Losing people changes the shape of the team. An EQ assessment or a Conflict Style across the remaining managers tells you where to invest L&D budget over the following two quarters — often quite differently from where you would have invested it three months earlier.
- Restore a sense of individual agency. A report written about a person, focused on their development, returned to them in a private conversation — this is a small thing but a real thing after a period where the individual has felt like a number in a spreadsheet.
For people who are leaving
- Outplacement support grounded in actual data. A leaving employee who walks into their next job interview with a clear articulation of their working style, their motivators, and their likely team fit is more employable than one who has to reconstruct that narrative from memory.
- Honest career-direction conversations. A Work Values report can prompt the question "is the role you've been doing actually aligned with what drives you?" — a question many people have not asked themselves in years. Sometimes the answer is genuinely useful and changes what they look for next.
The shape we recommend: as part of outplacement, offer any leaving employee (at their choice, not as a condition) a psychometric assessment and a thirty-minute debrief. Pay for the instrument. Use an external coach for the debrief wherever possible — HR is too close to the decision to be heard clearly in this particular conversation.
The ethics are not decorative
Everything in this piece rests on a principle worth being explicit about: during a restructure, the power imbalance between employer and employee is at its steepest. Anything the employer does in that window that looks like assessment-of-the-person rather than support-for-the-person will be read — correctly — as the former, no matter how it was intended.
Which means: be explicit about purpose. "This assessment is for your development, not for any decision about your role" should be written into the invitation. It should be backed by a policy you can show. If anyone internal pushes to repurpose the data, the answer is no, and the reason is the policy.
A note on timing
The single most useful intervention is a regular rhythm of development assessment before any restructure is planned. A company that runs DISC at onboarding, Work Values at the first annual review, and EQ at promotion into management has a rich history of development data when a restructure hits. A company that commissions its first assessment during the restructure has nothing to draw on and every assessment looks like threat.
The investment in the good times is what makes the humane option possible in the bad ones.