We went to town to ask several business leaders: “What differentiates competing organisations? With the current rate of technological advancement and innovations, growing access to information and an increasingly shrinking global space, what really would constitute a competitive advantage for organisations in today’s world of business?”
Interestingly their responses were similar, with answers such as People! Human Capital! Human Assets! Human Resources! and many more.
…But we beg to differ!
Could it be that they all were wrong, or is there an additional layer to the traditional production factors?
And our answer is a resounding yes; there is an improvement to the traditional production factors – The RIGHT People!
Selecting and developing the right people is similar to being on a war front. You’ll need to identify and hire the right people into your organisation, keep high-performing employees satisfied, engaged and motivated to avoid turnover, and identify developmental needs and put processes in place to address them. All these can be a lot for the HR professional to juggle simultaneously. That is why selecting and developing the right people is synonymous with Winning the War for Talent.
Hiring, retaining and developing the right people creates the most value in achieving a competitive advantage in today’s business ‘war front’. Let us take a look at how organisations that are winning the war on talent are doing it.
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The Assessment & Development Centre Concept
The notion of an assessment and development centre (AC & DC) often throws up pictures of a building or an assortment of rooms devoted to development and assessment activities. But then, this is not precisely the case. Instead, these concepts are beyond the physical arrangements. They refer to ‘methodologies and techniques’ designed to simulate real-life work situations to measure participants’ competencies related to their performance on the job.
Development centres sprouted from the Assessment Centre model; however, majorly for developmental purposes; high performing organisations increasingly use it to develop talent. A development centres’ goal is to assess a candidate’s capability for their next career role and focus on personal and professional development.
Assessment/Development Centres & Organisational Strategies
In addition to serving as a means for selecting and developing talents, they can also be used to convey your organisation’s commitment to its people. They are also utilised for making capacity development decisions, which would impact the organisations’ bottom line.
Recruiting, retaining and developing the right people makes an organisation’s human capital a strategic resource for achieving a competitive edge over competitors. In essence, the right people become the basis for the business strategy.
Do Assessment Centres Work? Our Success Story
The success of assessment centres is based on providing a more accurate method of predicting a candidate’s fit for the job or otherwise based on pre-identified and defined competencies.
To ascertain the claim’s veracity, we have used data from a pool of candidates who have been tested and assessed at various graduate recruitment programs by best-in-class organisations across sectors like banking, consumer goods and oil & gas.
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From a sample size of 70,682 candidates who sat for graduate aptitude tests, about 11,933 had scores that would have been considered successful for the different tests they sat for; a 17% success rate. The successful candidates were subsequently taken through assessment centres. The exercises were designed to assess them against the various competencies for the respective jobs they were being considered for.
Results from the assessment centres showed that only about 39% of these candidates who passed the aptitude tests were successful when directly assessed against the competencies required on the job.
These findings become even more impressive when considering that many organisations make hiring decisions based solely on aptitude tests or formal interviews. Without any link to the job’s competencies, these methods (aptitude tests, formal interviews) alone prove quite inadequate in identifying the right candidates for the role.
At Workforce Resourcing, we are confident that a well designed and deployed Assessment Centre is currently the most proven way of selecting the right talent in today’s business world. This belief informed our investment in developing a world-class Assessment Centre that has proven to be the best selection method for our clients when rated based on accuracy, acceptability and prediction of performance on the job.
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