Organisations put a lot of importance into the use of assessment centres, either to check the readiness of an employee pushing for a higher position or as a part of the process of screening candidates for new positions. A similar measure of importance needs to be placed on the type of assessment exercises you intend to deploy in any of these situations.
The workforce of every organisation is its competitive advantage. Having a competent and effective team can deliver exponential value to your organisation because of a significant performance differential. Similarly, wrong hires or unfit employees in key positions can be incredibly damaging to your organisation’s success.
Choosing assessment exercises that are not effectively testing your high-scaling employee or potential staff can prove costly for the organisation. You don’t want candidates to perform woefully, but at the same time, having all candidates perform well is just as unhelpful.
So, what do you do to ensure your deployed assessment exercises serve the specific purpose for their use? What factors should you consider in identifying the right assessment exercise?
5 Factors for Deploying Effective Assessment Exercises
There are a large number of assessment exercises available to employers today, depending on their purpose for use. Some organisations even chose to design theirs to tailored requirements. The options available are unlimited, but how do you refine your choice to ensure you get the right exercise for your purpose?
Here are some key things to consider when choosing an assessment exercise:
Frequency of Use
The first place to start will be to ascertain the number of times you intend to deploy the exercise, and, importantly, the number of candidates or employees you’ll be testing. When you have a group of candidates for testing, or you plan to deploy an exercise once or twice, your best bet is ‘off-the-shelf’ assessment exercises.
However, designing your assessment exercise is more cost-effective when you plan to use it more often.
Role Requirement/Competencies
The choice of an assessment exercise needs to be relevant to the position on offer. Providing appropriate answers to questions like, ‘What specific skills are needed in the candidate?’ or ‘what competencies do you measure for employees seeking higher positions?’ will pave the way for further deliberation on choosing the right assessment exercise.
Assessment Exercise Style
Deciding on the style of an assessment largely depends on the role you’re assessing for and the requirements for that role. Again, you will need to give purposeful responses to questions on the best methods to deliver the exercises, whether it needs to be written or oral, individual, one-to-one or in a group, etc.
Your Likely Candidates
There will certainly be no exercises without assessable candidates. On another occasion, knowing your candidates or high-aiming employee should be one of the things you should put into consideration when choosing your assessment exercises. The importance of determining the needs and goals of the right candidate is immeasurable.
Making that uneasy decision on what your assessment exercises will consist of should also be based on the candidates’ current level and their level of exposure. Several off-the-shelf tools give the option to choose the difficulty level depending on the role you’re assessing, from operation to executive, for example.
Reliability of the Assessment Exercise
The consistency of your assessment results over time is as important as its quality and usefulness. Results of the assessment need to be dependable in measuring a specific characteristic. This implies that your candidate or employee should likely get a similar score when they repeat the test.
While these are priority factors you should consider in making the choice of an assessment exercise, it is also important to check the extent of standardisation; how it sets up clear precedence to increase the reliability of your assessment. The validity and practicality of the assessment exercise and its relevance to set out goals must also align.
Assessment exercises usually comprise of psychological tests, intelligence tests and personality tests. They are usually deployed for both potential candidates and existing staff to test their ability. Example of a medium where assessment exercises are used is the assessment centre. There are also numerous assessment centre exercises that you can use when testing for different competencies in candidates.
They include Competency-Based Interview (CBI), Group Exercise, Case Study Analysis, Presentation Exercise, Role Play Exercise, Emotional Intelligence exercise, Business Simulation Game, Situational Judgement test etc. Checkout how the first five exercises listed above are conducted in this article.
Understandably, the overall process of choosing the right assessment exercise for your candidates or employees looking to scale higher can be cumbersome. That’s why we are here! We’ve developed a knack for consistently helping our clients make the right assessment choices using the considerations outlined in this article as benchmarks.
We can help you too, and guarantee that the outcome will be similar to our previous clients – Effective, Efficient and Successful! Send us a mail to get started on your needs; hello@workforcegroup.com.
Akindele Afolabi
Director, Workforce Resourcing