Assessment Centres

Introduction

Organisations use Assessment Centres to ensure that potential employees have demonstrable skills and attitudes that fit their culture. Ensuring that the individual fits the organisation can eliminate mistakes that often prove costly. Essentially an Assessment Centre consists of a number of phases as follows:

Defining the Competencies that You Want to Assess

Assessment Centres are designed to test behaviour, attitude, interpersonal and organisational skills. Some clients assess additional skills such as report writing and numerical reasoning. An Assessment Centre will have a mixture of individual and team tasks that will be performed by the candidates while being observed.

Identifying and Training Your Observers

Once the competencies have been agreed, a team of observers needs to be identified and trained. There should be sufficient observers to ensure that each candidate is assessed by more than one observer. The observer training will describe the tasks and which competencies each task is designed to test. A marking system will also be agreed to ensure consistency.

Pre-assessment Exercises

Prior to the Assessment Centre, some clients ask the candidates to undertake additional exercises. These could include personality profiling, report writing or numerical reasoning.

Executing the Assessment Centre

The amount of time needed to execute the Assessment Centre will depend upon the number of candidates to be assessed. Normally each candidate is invited for a day. Each day will have a timetable that sets out who does what when. The observers will have a document for each candidate they have been assigned to observe; these usually have a photograph of the candidate on the front.

Producing the Assessment Report

The Assessment Centre report pulls together the results of the observed exercises together with any pre-assessment exercises undertaken.

To read an Assessment Centre Case Study click here.