Assessment Centres – How They Work

Most candidates attending an assessment centre to get a job have no idea how they work. Here we provide you with guidance on how they are designed and what to expect.

Assessment Centre Design

Companies use assessment centres as a means of selecting candidates because they are around 3 times better than a standard interview at finding people who will be a success when they join. So although they can be expensive and time consuming to run it means companies have a much better chance of avoiding hiring mistakes.

Why is that? Well assessment centres use a range of different selection techniques and trained assessors to rate candidates against a set of competencies. Each company will have worked out the behaviours and skills of its successful performers and these are used to select new staff. Examples of competencies might be; problem solving and interpersonal skills.

Assessing Competencies

Assessment centres will include a number of stages and at each one different competencies are assessed. Normally each competency is assessed twice at an assessment event. The table below is a good example of how this works. There are 4 parts to the assessment centre and overall 7 competencies are being rated. For example in the group discussion the assessors will be looking at Drive for Results, Courage and Conviction and Interpersonal skills.

Looking at each competency you can see where it is assessed. For example Curiosity is assessed in the interview and the presentation.

How Does This Help Me?

If you understand the design of an assessment centre you have a number of advantages;

• You can ask a company if they will send you the competencies ahead of the day to help you prepare. They will often do this but will not tell you what is assessed at each stage
• If they do not send out the competencies go back to the job description they are often listed in the essential and desirable attributes
• It means you know that every competence is not assessed in each exercise. You can often take a good guess of what is being assessed when you see the exercise
• You won’t necessarily fail because you don’t do well at one exercise because remember – each competency is looked at twice

Where Can I learn More?

We work with many career coaching clients to help them prepare for and be successful at assessment centres. These are often used for graduate entry schemes and where companies are looking for a number of people to fill the same job e.g. Marketing Manager. So if you want some help please feel free to call us, or email us using the contact details in the side bar.

If you want to prepare yourself without career coaching support we have written an article called Top 10 Tips for Assessment Centre Success. Take a look it provides lots of useful and practical advice that has worked consistently for our clients.

Tony Goddard

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