ASSESSMENT CENTRE

What is an Assessment Centre?

'Assessment Center' is a method for assessing intellectual capabilities, aptitude and personal attributes. It provides a higher validity level for test outcomes than other selection methods. Candidates who do well in Assessment Centres are more likely to succeed in the company.
We use a wide range of exercises and tests to evaluate candidates against the standard / required competencies.

ASSESSMENT CENTER
The Assessment Center is a process of systematically gathering data concerning the potential of a job candidate or an existing employee
(the center is used to assess the skills and abilities of both job seekers and current employees who seek promotions)

In a sense, the assessment center is a test, but it differs in many respects from tests such as paper and pencil or work-sample tests.

An Assessment Centre
gives input on training & development needs.
provides an ideal opportunity to identify individual potential. assesses individual behaviours and competencies identified as essential for success in a management and leadership role. provides personalized feedback on strengths as well as areas for improvement.

ASSESSMENT CENTER
Some common characteristics of assessment centers are:

1. Purpose:
The primary purpose of the assessment center is to enable organizations to make improved hiring and promotion decisions, primarily at the first line management level. Assessment centers are also used to pinpoint development needs.

2. Eligibility:
Generally, an employee requests to attend. On other occasions, a supervisor may suggest to an employee that he or she attend.

ASSESSMENT CENTER
Some common characteristics of assessment centers are: 3. Location: Assessment centre activities are generally held away from work, in hotel seminar rooms. Larger companies have their own facilities. American Telephone and Telegraph Corporation (AT&T) has more than 50 center through out United States.

ASSESSMENT CENTER
Some common characteristics of assessment centers are:

4. Number of participants:
The number of participants ranges from 10 to 15 per session

5. Length of sessions:
-

Two and a half days seems to be fairly common length.

What Happens at the Assessment Center

Assessment center procedures vary depending on:

the job for which the participants are being assessed and depending on who is sponsoring the program. activities used in the assessment center in assessing the managerial potential of non managers includes:
An in-depth interview concerning career goals A general mental ability test A reasoning ability test A knowledge of current affairs test A series of in-basket exercises A business game involving the start-up and operation of a toy company Role playing.

Who Does The Assessing?

Normally, five or six trained assessors who are line managers and who have volunteered for a temporary assignment as assessors do the job

Tools And Exercises

Psychometric Test

Leadership Exercise
Group Discussion

Role Play
In Basket Exercise Panel Interviews

Team of Assessors
We use a team of experienced and qualified assessors/observers.
Ideally, each assessor/observer observes each participant in at least one of the various situations in which they are asked to perform, to aid objectivity

How Do they Work?

The observers rate individual candidates on a range of set indicators, using a prescribed performance scale. Results are then cross compared against the same indicators, which are measured in other tests. Following test completion, observers meet to discuss the test results and reach a group consensus about each individual's ratings.

Assessment Cetre Exercises

Psychometric Test
Psychometric tests are designed to measure a participants intellectual capabilities for thinking, logical reasoning, numerical reasoning, decision making and special abilities Psychometric testing falls into three main types:
Ability testing Aptitude testing Personality testing

We use 5 main types of psychometric test to asses Ability, Aptitude and Personality:
Personality test Comprehension Test. Numerical Reasoning test: Logical sequencing ability test Diagrammatic and Spatial reasoning test.

In-Basket Exercise
In this test the candidates are asked to assume a particular role as an employee of a fictitious company and work through the correspondence in their assigned intray.

For example it's a weekend afternoon, and nobody else is in the office. There's a pile of papers on the desk and they have just an hour or so to go through all of it and leave appropriate memos or messages to deal with whatever needs attention. The in-basket is jumbled: some things are there just for the hell of it. Some things are urgent. Sometimes the solution is at the top of the pile; the problem is at the bottom. Sometimes there are conflicting messages.
This exercise is designed to measure your ability to organize and prioritize work.

Role Play
In a role play exercise, the candidate is asked to assume a fictitious role and handle a particular work situation.
Customer Service Officers may be asked to respond to a number of phone inquiries, including customer queries and complaints. Managers may be asked to provide feedback to a sales representative staff member, or meet with a same level manager of another section, to gain their agreement on a service delivery strategy

This type of exercise may measure:

oral communication customer service orientation maximizing performance influencing and problem solving

Group Discussion
Leaderless discussion group. They discuss for 20 to 30 minutes and try to come up with some good ideas. As they speak, they are silently observed by assessors.

Case Study
This test is designed to assess the mental ability (mental manipulation) of candidates.

The candidates will be given a case history and asked to examine the situation, identify problems and suggest possible solutions and make a presentation of around fifteen minutes with five minutes for Q & A. This is designed to measure candidates presentation skills including his/her ability to organize and structure the information and to communicate his/her points clearly and concisely.

Panel Interviews
Candidates are interviewed by a panel of four to six people and therefore the decision is not reliant on just one person's opinion.
The panel will assess all of the candidates against the same criteria.

The main advantage of a panel interview is that it reduces the possibilities of a mismatch of personalities and has a chance to impress a number of different people.

How are the Evaluation used?

The procedure is as follows:
Using pools judgment,
each participants is categorized as more than acceptable, acceptable, less than acceptable or unacceptable These rating are then used as important / selection criteria for future human resource decisions The rating is not the only criterion used in making the HR decisions.

Do Assessment Center Works?

Research studies show that this technique is more valid than traditional selection methods.
The Assessment center method is very costly (approximately $5000 per assessee). Many organization think the benefits for outweigh the costs.

The key to the assessment centres success is the use of job related exercises to assess participants potential.
Assessment centre exercise in effect constitute a series of work sample test that measure the assessees potential to perform managerial work.

Thank you