“There is a danger that assessment centres will become a panacea, fulfilling HR’s desire to appear sophisticated by bringing some form of metrics into the process.”

The recruitment process has gone through many phases as organisations seek to get better at hiring people that more closely match their requirements.

The recruitment process used to take the form of an unstructured interview, possibly by way of a lunch meeting where one of the key criteria was the holding of the knife and fork!

Since those days we have introduced psychometric tests, structured and competency based interviews and of course assessment centres.

This has occurred against the background of enforcing legislation compelling practitioners, quite rightly, to be more objective in their assessment methods and to record the rationale for their decisions.

Assessment centres have many advantages, they test a wide range of skills and abilities and will often involve line managers in the selection process ensuring a consistency of treatment across all candidates.

On the down side though, they are very labour intensive. One assessor per candidate may be required and post-analysis can take a considerable amount of time, which is not necessarily a bad thing given the importance of selection decisions.

But has the day for assessment centres now passed? Are candidates becoming so sophisticated that selection has become a game in which they now know the role they have to play?

A typical assessment centre includes an interview, some form of psychometric and group exercise and perhaps a presentation.

A group discussion will measure key competencies of teamworking and influencing skills. Candidates, however, are becoming savvy and will try to demonstrate behaviours they know assessors are looking for. So someone will get squeezed out but is the worst candidate for these competencies necessarily the wrong one?

I think there is a danger that assessment centres will become a panacea, fulfilling HR’s desire to appear sophisticated by bringing some form of metrics into the process.

For all the careful assessment of candidates how good are we at assessing the effectiveness of the centres themselves? How many people have examined their assessment centres statistically to look at the correlation between different exercises to see if in fact there is duplication of measurement?

For example, if the results from a presentation exercise correlate closely with the interview scores, why do them both? Do we ever ask questions such as these? It provides a good opportunity to dust down those statistical tests so loved from CIPD studies!

I would be interested to hear what work organisations have done to validate their assessment centres once staff have been recruited. Clearly this may be difficult for one-off recruitment exercises where perhaps only one or two people are recruited.

But what about graduate recruitment? How many people have revisited their recruitment a year on and compared appraisal ratings against criteria measured during an assessment centre? I would be interested in the feedback on this.

Who has done research on the candidates’ perspective of assessment centres? The perceived wisdom is that candidates are impressed because it shows the importance that recruiters place on the whole process and so how much they value the people they recruit.

That may well be correct – but has it ever been checked out? I suspect that a well run assessment centre is a good advertisement for the recruiting organisation, but how many of them are well run? As the ‘war for talent’ hots up, the way in which recruiters portray themselves will become even more important and selling the corporate brand will become an even more integral part of the process.

I’d like to hear your views on assessment centres – what instances have you seen of good and bad practice? Who really does validate their centres? What changes have you made in recent times? Post your comments below.

About the author
Quentin Colborn is an independent HR consultant who runs assessment centres. He can be contacted on T: 07946 873274 or at Quentin@qcpeople.co.uk

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