Top Tips for designing assessment centres. Part 2: Choosing your exercises
10/05/2011, Author: Maria Gardner
Following on from last week’s blog on ‘considering the big stuff’ when designing assessment centres I’ve got my pearls of wisdom out again to share my thoughts on how to choose your exercises.
At this point, I’m assuming you know what role you are recruiting for, how many candidates you have (well, a rough estimate) and what you want to measure, i.e. competencies. So how do you use an assessment centre to most effectively measure these key success criteria that have been so lovingly been put together?
Essentially, this stage in the process is all about making decisions about what types of exercise will work best, but also how they will fit into the practical constraints of logistics and candidate numbers. So, read on for my top tips….
1. Think about candidate numbers and observer availability
Logistical questions such as these can influence the type of exercise you use. Practically, the greater the number of candidates you have the more observers you need. Group exercises are the most resource intensive, needing up to three observers available at the same time. Written exercises, on the other hand, require only one observer, who may even have time to observe another exercise in between setup and close (more on this in Part 3: Designing your assessment centre timetable).
2. Balance how you measure your success criteria across the different exercises
To effectively evaluate a candidate’s performance best practice suggests that you should measure each criterion in at least two different activities. That could be an exercise plus interview, or two different exercises. Ultimately, try to also vary the type of activities. For example if you are measuring ‘communicating & influencing’ you could use a combination of written exercise and role-play. This way you explore different facets of the same competency.
3. Get the level of challenge right for your candidates
Exercise portfolios are designed to represent different levels of challenge or role seniority, typically ranging from junior/non-management or graduate through to mid-level and senior/director level roles.
Getting the right level of exercise is important for a number of reasons. Firstly, if you have the right level of challenge it will provide you with more useful information. Secondly, it increases the face validity of the exercises in the eyes of the candidates, which in turn increases their engagement in the process. This, in turn, raises your profile as a viable potential employer.
4. Explore which exercise types are available
There are lots of different exercise types available, i.e. analysis exercises, group exercises, role-plays, planning exercises, visioning, etc. There can also be a fair amount of variety within these types as well, for example you can get written and/or presentation versions of most analysis exercises, assigned and non-assigned group exercises, to mention just a few.
So, when choosing an exercise firstly, consider how well it captures the success factors you want to measure. Secondly, how well that exercise type reflects the situations in which your candidates would need to apply that competency in the job.
I hope you’ve found these tips useful on how to get started with choosing your assessment centre exercises. Look out for Part 3: Designing your assessment centre timetable.
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