Choosing an Assessment Center for Employee Testing

Hiring and recruitment are key processes for any organization, but many companies simply don’t have the resources to design and implement a proper recruitment process. Outsourcing to an assessment center allows you to implement strong recruitment processes, frameworks, and test standards. While this will require investment upfront, it helps to ensure you are hiring for the long-term, recruit individuals who are matched to your culture, organization, and goals.

At the same time, not all recruitment centers will offer everything you need. It’s important to select an assessment center that matches your hiring needs, so that you ensure a positive result.

Process Validation

Process validation is crucial in any HR or assessment process, and your assessment center should be using it. This means that any assessment or framework they use should be validated against industry standards. You also want to ensure that your assessment center validates their processes inside your business, assesses their own results in your organization, and validates the techniques and methods using for hiring.

Why? Validation processes mean that your assessment center is actively working to ensure your recruitment process is driving good results. It also gives you data that proves they are doing so, which you can use to validate budget, review return on value, and otherwise legitimize the investment.

Diverse Selection Criterion

Assessment centers offer a lot of value in that they enable a more-complete hiring process, where candidates complete tests, trials, and assessment periods before hiring. Ensuring that your center utilizes a diverse range of selection criterion is the best way to ensure value.

For example, most candidates should be matched based on a variety of factors such as role-based fit, cultural fit, organizational fit, and future potential. This means mapping competencies, personality, behavior, emotional intelligence, and other factors, and then matching them to your goals and needs.

You can look for:

• Competency frameworks
• Employee profiling
• Skills assessment
• Qualified assessors
• Psychometric testing
• Practical examinations (skills assessment, knowledge tests)
• Culture fit
• Trial projects/assignments
• Emotional intelligence assessment
• Reference testing

In most cases, if your assessment center checks for a diverse range of qualifications, behaviors, and competencies, they are creating a better picture of that person and how that person will perform in the long-term. This will help you to make choices towards specific goals and strategy, rather than hiring what appears to be the best candidate now.

Adaption to Your HR Strategy

Many organizations have their own strategy and processes in place, any assessment center you employ must be able to adopt to these processes. For example, if HR has a strong internal leadership development program, your assessment center should be able to prioritize hiring for development. If HR wants to maintain a balance between juniors and seniors, prefers to hire on juniors and train them internally, or has any other defined strategy or goal, your assessment center should adapt to that.

Assessment centers can take over the recruitment process, screening initial applicants, selecting the best ones, and subjecting them to a range of tests designed to give you a better picture of potential personality, performance, behavior, and opportunity for development. This will pay off in the long-term, because you can invest in employees who show potential. However, it is important that you choose an assessment center matching your goals and needs.