You are an in-house HR professional, and your job is to be a magician — expected to produce miracles on demand.

You are an in-house HR professional, and your job is to be a magician — expected to produce miracles on demand. What is required of you:

• Find candidates who meet at least 15 requirements (some of them apparently contradictory), hold multiple degrees, have years of experience (while still being young and energetic), speak three foreign languages — Arabic would be an advantage.
• Identify the best candidate from an already strong pool of professionals in the field you are searching.
• Have found them yesterday, ideally.

How do you reach the maximum number of candidates who fit the requirements? How do you then select the best among them? And hardest of all — how do you choose just one? On what basis do you decide who to back? If you are going to pull a rabbit out of a hat, you need to be confident in your judgement — because when you back a candidate, you are also putting your professional reputation on the line.

The standard selection method is the classic interview. Frequently, for senior and key management positions, the interview proves insufficient as a selection method. It does not always allow us to test the so-called “hard”, or professional, skills of candidates. Nor to be fully confident about their “soft” skills and competencies.

In such cases, we need to know HOW to brew magical potions, in other words — to make use of the capabilities of Assessment Center, also known as Recruitment Panel, or Evaluation Centre. Its purpose is to streamline the selection process by distinguishing experienced, capable professionals from those who simply present well on paper.

Every good magician has a repertoire of spells, and the recipes in the Assessment Center / Recruitment Panel handbook include:

• Personality questionnaires
• Aptitude tests
• Professional knowledge tests
• Practical tasks and case studies
• Strategy development exercises
• Role-play simulations
• A meeting between the candidate and the prospective team

… and the ability to enchant in several ways…

Types of Assessment Centers / Recruitment Panels:

• Internal assessment centre / recruitment panel
• External assessment centre / recruitment panel
• Hybrid assessment centre / recruitment panel

The value of the magic:

Benefits of conducting an Assessment Center / Recruitment Panel:

• The employer gains a deeper understanding of the candidate’s knowledge, competencies, abilities, and potential.
• It enables better prediction of future performance of the candidate in a real working environment.
• The candidate has the opportunity to learn more about the organisation, the nature of the role, and the working environment.
• Assessment centres often bring out the competitive, sporting spirit of the candidates who participate, because they are being compared with other professionals at their level, and this motivates them to demonstrate what they are genuinely capable of.

NB! Sometimes the magic produces unintended reactions and has side effects

Risks of conducting an Assessment Center / Recruitment Panel:

• The entire process that constitutes an assessment centre / recruitment panel is time-consuming and resource-intensive — it requires communication and continuous feedback between the organisation and consultants (if external consultants are involved), as well as between consultants and candidates.
• If the tasks in the assessment centre / recruitment panel are poorly calibrated — significantly too easy or too difficult relative to the candidates’ level — the process can stall and the assessment centre may prove inadequate for the position, and ultimately unsuccessful.
• The length of the process can lead to candidate drop-off — some may lose interest in the role; others who are actively job-searching may not be in a position to wait for the process to conclude; others still may be put off by delays (with good coordination between the organisation and the consulting firm, this risk can be minimised or avoided altogether).

The magicians: A word of advice instead of dessert

From our consulting practice:

• Run an assessment centre / recruitment panel when one is genuinely warranted for the position in question — meaning that what is being tested is critically important for that specific role. If the most critical requirement for your new hire is the ability to lead people, test their leadership potential and style. Not their abstract-logical reasoning.
• The complexity of the tasks must match the requirements of the position.
• Use an optimal number of assessment tools — neither too many nor just one.
• Running a standardised, eliminatory test for every position across an entire organisation is not a good idea. Different roles require different knowledge, skills, and competencies.
• Do not test the limits of your candidates’ patience.