Assessment
Whether you want to use assessment for recruitment, development or restructuring we design centres that enable you to observe candidates demonstrating their skills, ability and potential.
Assessment Centres: we start with your selection criteria and then choose appropriate exercises that reflect elements of the job that you are recruiting for. Exercises can range from psychometric tests and questionnaires to structured interviews and simulations (e.g. role plays, case studies, presentations, discussions and etrays). We provide all the documentation you need: schedules, assessor guidelines, criteria based questions, behaviour based rating forms etc. to run an effective assessment centre. Whilst we can design and run the entire centre for you, we encourage managers and HR professionals to get fully involved. To this end we provide assessor training courses to equip you with the necessary skills.
Development Centres: we can design events which utilise a similar format and tools as assessment centres to identify development needs. Each individual participant takes part in a variety of exercises and is then given feedback on their performance which feeds into development planning. Development centres have a flexible format which means that there is scope for providing some feedback and learning within the centre as well as using the process as a way of identifying development needs in a focused way and kick-starting a longer process of learning and development. Some organisations use development centres to look at the needs of different functions or organisational levels. Making an audit of the strengths and development needs of a population helps them to make decisions about the skills they have enough of, the skills they need more of and helps inform decisions about future recruitment and development to ensure the success of the organisation.
We can design a development centre for your organisation and either train your managers in the necessary assessment and feedback skills or provide the resource ourselves. We can also partner with you and others to design follow-up initiatives so that you can address the needs that the development centre has highlighted.
We believe that development centres should be two-way and as well as giving tasks to participants we ask them to analyse their own performance. This can provide useful insights, not only into the participant's development needs, but into their level of self-awareness.