Designing a successful assessment centre

Assessment centres have been around for a long time, the British Army and Navy has been using them since WWII to recruit officers but over time they have become more sophisticated and arguably more complicated.  Here we’ll talk you through the steps you need to consider to design and run a successful event.

Skills & Behaviours

The first step is to figure out what you want to measure.  Any employee comes in two half’s, 50% is their skills, knowledge and experience and the other 50% is their attitude or behaviour.  At work we need both, even if a colleague has all the skills in the world, if they have poor behaviour the working relationship won’t work.

Skills are often best defined in the job description or person specification, behaviours are more subjective.  The trick is to create a list of what’s essential to be measured and then design activities that measure them.  For example:

• Skills – Marketing, Negotiating, Financial Analysis
• Behaviours – Assertiveness, decisive, planning, organised

When selecting an activity to measure skills or behaviours you should consider the following:

Selecting Activities

1. Is the activity at the right level, will candidates be able to do it
2. How long is the task likely to take if the task is too long, candidates may lose focus or become bored
3. How is it going to be marked, is it subjective (i.e. based on someones opinion) or objective (marked against a defined answer)
4. How is it going to be administered, group or individual, pen and paper, observed task, online or face to face
5. Can the task be bought in or do you have to create it yourself

This stage is critical to the process, if your activity does not precisely cover the skill or behaviour you may find candidates questioning why they are doing it, or recruiters challenging the validity of the results.

Many activities can be bought in but they are also fairly simple to set up yourself.  The advantage of bought in activities is that they are normally externally validated (i.e they have been checked that they measure what they are supposed to) and come with a norm group that allows you to compare your candidate results against others that have done the same activity to see where they rank.

Buying in is not always the cheapest option but can be the most reliable.  Good suppliers include SHL and Saville Consulting.

If you decide to design your own make sure the task is relevant to job, is simple to administer and has been tested in-house to make sure you know what the answer is and if test candidates had any difficulties in completing it.

Types of Activities

Here are some sample activities that can be used in an assessment centre:

1. Numeracy test
2. Presentation activity
3. Group discussion/negotiation activity
4. Written report
5. Panel or individual interview
6. Group problem solving activity
7. Individual problem solving activity
8. In tray activity (communication, planning, problem solving)
9. Technical test
10. Role play
11. Personality profile

Designing a Structure

Once you have worked out what you want to measure, the next step is to design your structure.  If you are working with large numbers of candidates this step is important to make sure you know:

1. What room(s) you will need
2. How many assessors you will need
3. How long the whole process will take from arrival to close
4. How many sets of materials you’ll need

Scoring

An accurate and fair scoring system is essential to a good assessment regime.  All activities should result in hard scores, its difficult to make a decision on a candidates suitability through subjective responses such as ‘performed well’, ‘came across as professional’ etc. The easiest types of scores are where you have a mark out of x for an activity or where a candidate is given a grade based on how they performed against a criteria.  For example:

When assessing a presentation activity, you may have certain criteria that you are looking for such as oral communication, attention to detail, relevance of answer, question handling etc.  In each case you would have a definition of what good looked like and then a scoring mechanism that gives candidates marks out of 5, e.g. 1 did not meet the criteria, 3 adequately met the criteria, 5 exceeded the criteria.  The assessors would be briefed on what good looks like and given examples of a presentation that scored 1, 3 or 5.

Although the above is still subjective to some extent, it does give hard scores and is less open to misinterpretation by assessors.

A good assessment centre should be a balance between defined tests and observed activities to allow the candidate to present themselves in the best light.

Analysis

When all the scores are in its now time to do the analysis.  A good tool for this is Excel.  If you have built the assessment regime properly you should be able to enter the scores for each candidate, for each task and you are looking for the candidates that consistently scored the highest grades across the range of activities.  Scoring can become more complex when you introduce norms or averages, but in its simplest form the scores should result in a ranked table of performance, from those that performed consistently well to those that performed consistently poorly.

If constructed well your assessment regime will give the chance for candidates to present themselves in the best light possible across a range of different types of activities or scenarios.

Ethics and the Law

Ethical assessment is essential to creating a fair assessment process and making sure you do not purposely discriminate against others.

• 1st rule – make it doable.  Assessment centres should be designed to be challenging but not impossible.  If it is clear you have weighted the activities to a minority of applicants then the process is unfair
• 2nd rule – create balance.  Candidates should have a chance to show themselves in a range of activities not just one.  If you make potential recruitment decisions based on one activity then it can be challenged as being unfair
• 3rd rule – be objective.  Have clearly defined scoring criteria for each activity that is transparent and that the assessors understand
• 4th rule – be honest.  If challenged be prepared to share your results.  Under law applicants have the right to access personal information gathered about them during a recruitment process, make sure your regime and any subsequent decision to interview a candidate would stand up to scrutiny.
• 5th rule – equal access.  All candidates should have equal access to the assessment process.  Consider the needs of candidates that may have English as a second language or may have a physical or mental disability.  You should have a plan in place to handle the needs of those that may have a disability