The Role of Assessment Centres in Talent Acquisition

Author: Leong Siaw Lin is a Solutions Consultant at Accendo Technologies, where she specialises in providing strategic solutions to address the Talent Management needs of clients. With a background in organisational psychology and more than six years of consulting experience, her primary focus lies in multi-figure portfolios, assisting clients in achieving their strategic goals.

In today's fiercely competitive job market, acquiring top talent is not just a goal but crucial for an organisation's success. As a strategic HR partner, you play a pivotal role in bringing the best individuals into your organisation. While traditional approaches, such as interviews and psychometric assessments, provide valuable insights into an individual's workplace behaviour and cognitive abilities, they have limitations and seldom reveal their full potential strengths and development areas.

Today, our clients recognise the advantages of combining assessment tools, interviews, and assessment centres. This hybrid approach delivers a more comprehensive understanding of candidates and their suitability for specific roles.

An assessment centre incorporates a blend of exercises and activities, including presentations, teamwork simulations, and real-world business cases. These activities are carefully designed to unveil the full potential of your candidates and depict how your candidate would perform under certain work conditions.

According to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development's survey on ‘Recruitment, Retention and Turnover’, 34% of employers now use assessment centres when recruiting managers, professionals and graduates.

Why Build an Assessment Centre

1. Acquire the Best Talents: One of the primary objectives of an assessment centre is to identify high-quality candidates who have the potential to excel in specific roles, especially in graduate hiring programs.
2. Holistic Evaluation: An assessment centre combines a variety of exercises and activities, such as role-play, interviews, business cases, and team activities, which provide a more in-depth understanding of an individual’s capability to succeed in a role.
3. Reinforces Employer’s Branding: Incorporating assessment centres in your recruitment strategy sends a powerful message to potential candidates – that your organisation makes an effort to practise fair and informed hiring decisions.
4. Involve Hiring Managers: ?Assessment centres empower managers to systematically be involved in the selection process. By being involved in the selection, they gain confidence in the selection process and ensure candidates are the best fit for their team.
5. Positive Candidate Experience: A well-structured assessment centre creates a positive impression on candidates, as they perceive the hiring process to be fair and transparent. This results in candidates sharing their positive experiences with their network, elevating your employer’s branding.

A recent survey by Employment Review magazine revealed that more than 9 out of 10 employers using assessment centres believe they are a ‘very effective’ or ‘fairly effective’ means of selecting staff.

Implementing an Assessment Centre: Key Considerations

While the benefits of assessment centres are clear, successfully implementing them requires careful consideration of several key factors:

1. Leadership Support: Convince your organisation's leaders of the alignment between assessment centres and the broader strategic goals. Highlight how this approach can benefit the overall business performance, elevate the company’s empowered branding and make a positive impression on candidates.
2. Customise the Assessment Centre: To suit your organisation's unique needs and goals. Identify the specific competencies and skills you want to evaluate during the assessment process.
3. Invest in Resources: Allocate resources for training internal assessors or consider hiring external assessors with expertise in evaluating candidates or employees effectively.
4. Change Management: Develop a comprehensive plan to inform all stakeholders and employees about the new assessment centre processes. Address any concerns or questions they may have to ensure a smooth transition.

Two-thirds (64%) of employers using assessment centres deploy them as part of their graduate recruitment programmes.

How Our Clients Improved Their Hiring Strategy with Assessment Centres

Our clients have seen significant improvements in their hiring strategies by incorporating assessment centres into their talent acquisition processes. These success stories follow a common pattern:?

• Identifying Challenges: Clients identify challenges in their existing hiring processes, such as difficulty in identifying top talent and subjective hiring processes.
• Setting Goals: They create a specific, measurable outcome they want to achieve with an assessment centre. For example, success metrics can include increasing the percentage of hiring top-performance candidates.
• Custom Solution: They partner with Accendo to design tailored assessment centres that address these challenges. This often involves creating custom business cases and exercises that align with the organisation's specific hiring needs.

How Accendo Can Help Elevate Your Talent Management

We understand that designing and implementing assessment centres can be challenging, time-consuming, and daunting. That's why Accendo is here to support you every step of the way:

• Tailor-Made Assessment Centres: We excel in fine-tuning assessment batteries to closely match your organisation's unique needs and requirements. For example, we can design custom business cases that precisely evaluate participants' knowledge and expertise in your industry.
• Empower Your Assessors: Accendo provides comprehensive, hands-on training for your internal assessors, ensuring they have the skills and knowledge needed to conduct assessments effectively.
• External Assessors: In cases where you may have a shortage of internal resources, we offer a team of experienced external assessors who can seamlessly run assessment centres for all job levels.

Unlock the full potential of your talent management by partnering with Accendo today. Visit our website to discover more about our tailored solutions.