Top Tips for designing assessment centres. Part 3: Designing your assessment centre timetable
18/05/2011, Author: Maria Gardner
Here is my final instalment in my Top Tips for designing assessment centres. Following on from asking yourself ‘What do I need?’ and picking your exercises, the final insights I offer up on this topic (for the moment) are around how to put it all together – in other words, how to design an effective and user-friendly assessment centre timetable:
1. Clearly state your requirements when booking rooms. This includes room size, table set up, number of chairs, and equipment needed, i.e. flip chart, clock, laptop, etc. Also, this may be stating the obvious but book your rooms close together. This reduces the chances of loosing candidates between exercises (yes, this can happen!) and the amount running around you have to do.
2. Better to start early and finish early. Despite best intentions assessment centres tend to be long (long, long) days – which typically result in tired and potentially grumpy (hungry, I need a drink!) wash up discussions. Where possible, I always aim to get the last candidate finished by 4pm to ensure wash up discussions finish at a sensible time. If necessary, to meet this deadline I will start candidate welcomes at 8am.
3. Over estimate the amount of time needed. It is better to add in extra time, i.e. 5 minutes for each exercise to allow for moving between rooms, questions, other activities running late, etc than to be optimistic and constantly playing catch up with your time.
4. Don’t forget to allow for administration time. Often I’ll see clients only schedule into a timetable the 30 minutes required for a group exercise, for example, and forget about the time needed to read out the instructions, answer questions and collect in the materials.
5. Check with the interview panel how much time they (honestly) need. Without meaning to name names, the interview panel can be one of the biggest causes of an assessment centre timetable going astray. Make friends with your interview panel upfront, find out what they need and get them bought into the benefits of sticking to time.
6. Consider using an actor for role-plays. Whilst they may be an additional expense, to what is already a costly process, the skill, expertise and insight they offer far outweighs, in my opinion, the extra pennies added to your overall budget. However, different actors have different strengths so take time to discuss requirements with your supplier to ensure you get a good fit between the actor and the role-play scenario.
7. Make sure candidates are seen by different observers. This is one of those rules that should always, always be observed to ensure a fair assessment design. Your timetable should be designed so that each candidate is seen by different observers in each exercise. For consistency purposes this may mean the same observer assessing the same exercise several times.
8. Colour-code your timetable. I think this more one of my personal quirks than standard assessment centre design practice, but I find allocating each exercise a different colour a very good way of seeing where there is scope to overlap exercises.
9. Take a dynamic approach to scheduling your exercises. A classic mistake I see happening is when all candidates are scheduled to complete the same exercise at the same time. This is very resource intensive, and with limited number of observers can lead to a significant amount of waiting around for candidates. Instead, identify several activities that could be run at the same time, e.g. analysis exercise, role-play, and interview and then rotate the candidates around them. This works best when the exercises are all of a similar length.
10. Build in time during the day for observers to do their write ups between exercises. Assessment centres are busy days for everyone involved and as an observer it is important to keep on top of writing up after each exercise. As a guide, when putting together a timetable I would be aiming to give each observer at least 20 minutes per write up per candidate after each exercise.
So there we are. I am now temporarily drained of all useful knowledge in the area of assessment centres. I hope you’ve found my top tips helpful, insightful, and may be at times vaguely amusing.
As you can imagine, there is always more than meets the eye when it comes to these things. So if you’ve got a few insights of your own, feel free to log in and comment. Or, if assessment centres are something you think you might like a little bit of help with please get in touch.
Maria
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