We help growing businesses achieve their goals by identifying, acquiring and growing their talent.
How?
- To identify capability, we use assessment centres to evaluate teams or groups of people, to identify the future potential of employees and job candidates. We also offer work-shadowing and 360 degree feedback when individuals or smaller numbers are involved or where people cannot come together in one place for an evaluation.
- To identify motivation and personality, we can provide psychometric assessment for selection and assessment purposes to organisations wishing to take the best decisions about its people. Personality can tell us how someone is likely to behave in given situations and motivation will indicate how willing someone is to use their capability. Used in conjunction with capability evaluation above, these tools can identify those people with the best fit for a particular role.
Click here to read more about our online psychometric assessment programs.
A competency is an observable skill or ability to complete a task or job successfully. The word 'competency' has been one of the most over-used notions in management development recently. Despite this it can be an essential part to a thorough and accurate appraisal. Once a company has established the key abilities or attributes that are necessary for effective employee performance, they may be incorporated into the appraisal system to make assessment more objective. The real strength of such a system is not in comparing people with each other in a competitive way, but analysing the progress of an employee in their own sense. This then directs attention to those areas where they are excelling or where skills may be improved.
We can provide the following services for talent acquisition and development:
- Defining competencies
- Designing recruitment processes
- Evaluation of recruitment and selection processes (including statistical analysis)
- Psychometric assessment (including on-line assessment)
- Assessment Centres
- Development Centres
- Work-shadowing
- 360 degree feedback
- Designing tailored assessment exercises (e.g. group discussions, role play exercises)
- Interview skills training
- Assessor observation skills training
Our most effective methods of selection
Structured interviewing
Unstructured Interviews (a casual face to face conversation) are still the most widely used selection tool by far, despite the fact that they are typically unreliable, invalid and subjective. Different interviewers may rate the same information differently, and features that are irrelevant to the personal attributes required for the job such as age, race, appearance, etc, introduce bias into how interviewers evaluate information. While it may be accepted that interviews will always be necessary in some shape or form, (for the purpose of selling the job to the candidate and communicating organizational values and norms to applicants) it is when a company relies solely on the interview that concerns over validity arise.
A structured interview usually involves questions which have been developed through a form of job analysis, thereby limiting the traditional subjectivity of assessment. Every candidate is asked each of the questions, or standardised versions of the questions, previously devised. Responses are rated by the interviewer using an objective, competency based scoring system.
Psychometric Testing
These tests are used to assess the mental abilities or personality characteristics of job candidates. They are standardised methods of gaining a set of responses from a candidate which may then be compared to a comparable sample group of people. Candidates are required to answer a carefully derived set of questions, which may focus on specific aspects of ability or facets of personality. Our Cognitive tests focus on aptitude, which is what an individual is capable of achieving in the future (their potential to learn). Scores on some tests require a trained consultant for their interpretation and no test should be administered or interpreted by a person lacking appropriate training. We can deliver the test on-line for maximum convenience, either at a venue of your own choosing such as home, or in a semi-supervised setting such as your own offices.
Click here to read more about our online psychometric assessment programs.
Assessment Centres
ACs have become increasingly popular over the recent years to obtain the best possible indication of an individual's actual or potential competence to perform at a target job. When properly designed and carried out, ACs have been consistently successful in making valid and reliable predictions of candidate success. We combine a number of different simulations and exercises that aim to reflect the tasks involved in the target job, which are given to a group of candidates over the course of a day. Typical behaviours assessed are often based on our competency framework, and include thinking, engaging, influencing and achieving behaviours. A reliable and valid AC will successfully combine the art of selection with the science of statistical analysis, to give a highly accurate indication of an individual's potential at a job.
360-degree feedback
The traditional idea of appraisal as simply a manager assessing the performance of an employee has been overtaken by a more holistic approach incorporating views from many angles. Multi-level, multi-source appraisal - also known as 360-degree feedback - consists of assessments made of an individual (the 'target') by subordinates, peers and superiors plus, in some cases, clients. It also usually requires the person being appraised to do a self-rating.
Our standards
Each assessment is carried out by a trained assessor who has been accredited in behavioural observation or is accredited to use psychometric testing tools. Each psychometric assessment, assessment centre or 360 analysis produces a tailored assessment report linked to the job and person specification, an in-depth face-to-face feedback session with an experienced assessment consultant, including a comprehensive client report and a summary candidate report.
