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What is an Assessment Centre?
Originating as officer selection boards in the armed forces, assessment centres are now growing in popularity in the commercial sector for the assessment of personnel.
People are often under the misconception that assessment centres are a specific 'venue' where candidates are 'sent' to be tested. This is not necessarily the case and an 'assessment centre' really refers to the combining of different selection methods. The assessment centre can last anything from several hours to several days.
There are many selection methods commonly used to make up the assessment centre, for example: interviews, work sample tests such as an in-tray exercise, role plays and psychometric tests.
This combing of several methods, along with the fact that judgements are made by several trained assessors, make the assessment centre a fair and reliable method of choosing new people.
Assessment centres are not just used for recruiting new people, they can also be used for training and developing, team building and performance appraisals of existing people.
One of the major drawbacks of using assessment centres is the cost of developing and running them, however, for larger scale recruitment and selection drives, they can be cost effective.
It could be argued that the costs of poor recruitment decisions are reason enough to justify their use.
For further information on assessment centres, call us at Curno Consulting.