ASSESSMENT CENTRE DESIGN

Appropriate Assessment Centre Design



Appropriate Assessment Centre Design

Introduction

An assessment center serves as an ideal location for the evaluation of candidates for their core skills, abilities and talents. Assessments carried out in assessment centers can help employers identify the degree to which candidates can provide productivity to the organization. Recent trends in the development of assessment centers has moved assessment centers from outside the organization (hotels, testing facilities, etc), to within the organization. Organizations now choose to develop and manage their own testing centers; mainly because it allows them to incorporate increased versatility and flexibility in their assessment procedures. This trend has highlighted the necessity of effective development of assessment centers. This discussion will attempt to present an outline of sorts for the development of an appropriate assessment center.

Discussion

The first building block of designing an appropriate assessment center is the essential assessment that will be carried out in the center. This involves the identification of the organization's human resource needs; specifically, the organization's recruitment and selection needs. It will be pointless to go through the trouble of developing an appropriate assessment center for a small number of vacancies. An appropriate assessment center is a suitable option only when the organization wishes to bring in large numbers of new employees Thornton & Krause, 2009). The recruitment and selection of Management Trainees across the organization is an excellent example of a case in which the development of an appropriate assessment center is next to critical in its importance. For this purpose, the recruitment and selection department should develop a comprehensive understanding of the job descriptions of the vacant positions in the organization (Hsin-Chih & Naquin, 2006). This should be followed by the development of a measurable assessment plan that can be implemented across a large number of candidates. For instance, it can help to develop a chapter based questionnaire that candidates can fill during the assessment. The nature of the chapters can be based on the constant requirements of the job position whereas the contents of the chapters (the questions in the chapters) can be changed each time the assessment is implemented (Melancon & Williams, 2006). It is imperative to note at this point that the purpose of this phase of the development of the assessment center is to develop exercises (large tests with segregated sub-tests) in order to test the candidates and put the candidates through a process through which their actual abilities can be assessed.

The second step is to bring the assessors in the loop. The importance of appropriately trained assessors is almost equivalent to that of appropriately development assessment exercises (Lievens, 2009). The assessors need to be fully aware of the rationale behind the assessment and the relevance of their roles in the assessment center. It merits highlighting at this point that the assessors will serve as the face of the organization during the implementation of the assessment in the assessment center. Most Assessment Centers take place in corporate offices or hotels and usually last a whole day, some ...