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Reproduced from an article
in People Management (June 1998), written by
Ruth McLuhan
Assessment Centres were originally
developed by the War Office Selection Board during
the Second World War to counter the high percentage
of officers selected by interview for promotion
who later failed on the job. Later they were taken
up in Britain by the civil service and public sector
and in the US by large corporations like IBM and
General Electric.
By the end of the 1980’s, the
technique had won widespread acceptance throughout
the public, private and voluntary sectors. A 1996
survey by the Industrial Society showed that two
thirds of HR managers and directors were either
using assessment centres or planned to in the near
future.
The term is actually misleading – "assessment
centre" refers not to a building, company
or institution but to the general method. Often
it describes a specific selection or development
project run by an organisation’s personnel managers,
who are often assisted or trained by external consultants.
Large organisations often prefer
to use residential conference venues, as they can
provide separate training rooms and a secluded
atmosphere. The cost is normally several hundred
pounds per individual, principally for the hire
of the venue and the provision of trained assessors.
Typically candidates are given a half or full day
of specially designed psychometric tests and competency-based
activities, involving group interplay, role-playing
and interactive exercises aimed at revealing as
much as possible about their abilities. Development
projects set up to assess existing managerial talent
may last two days or longer. By using a number
of tests and assessors, decisions about an individual
are balanced out. This is widely believed to make
the process fairer for the candidate as well as
more reliable for the organisation.
The use of video can also help
to ensure objectivity.
Assessment centres are used
at an international level for managerial development.
Pressured to reorganise by a 30 per cent annual
growth rate, global software company Systems Union
recently assembled 55 of it senior managers in
the UK to identify those best suited to crucial
leadership roles. "It involved a huge exercise
in scheduling", admits group HR director Ken
Parnis. "Also it was very staff intensive,
with a two to one ratio of participants to observers,
and the involvement of a number of our line managers
as well as HR people."
Another question mark over the
use of international assessment centres is the
question of cultural complexity. In the Systems
Union programme verbal reasoning tests, had to
be abandoned when managers from different cultures
had difficulty identifying concepts in the same
way. "The issue is how you create a process
that is fair to all of those who come through different
education systems," says Andrew Constable,
a director at Roffey Park Management Institute,
which helped design the Allied Domecq and Systems
Union projects. "You cannot exclude bias completely,
but you can try to limit it by training assessors
appropriately." He adds, "With different
cultures you have different norms of behaviour.
That is particularly true with the US and Australia,
where assertiveness is expected, compared with
some Asian countries where it is not the normal
way of communicating at all."
The variation in interpersonal
communications styles will affect assessment exercises,
according to occupational psychologist Binna Kandola,
who advises companies on assessment methodology.
He stresses the impact of subconscious behaviours
such as how close people stand to they are talking
to and how much emotion they show. "One question
is, when does looking become staring?" says
Kandola. "In one West African country we worked
in the amount of gaze acceptable is four to six
seconds, when European employers would expect eight
to nine seconds. In one context too much would
be considered aggressive, whereas in the other,
too little would be seen as shifty."
Another potential hazard is
language. Because English is increasingly the medium
of business for global organisations, assessors
need to be trained to cope with the difficulties
candidates may have with it. One approach is to
allow them extra time to complete the tests. "We
do a lot of background work in the country itself",
says DDI’s Lehman. "It is important to get
someone who speaks the language to check the materials
are going to work and that there are no words which
are going to derail people. "In assessing
one competency we use the idea of visionary leadership,
where people have to expound a vision in front
of large groups. In Italy when we did this people
started to laugh – it turned out that ‘visionary’ in
their language means someone who is hallucinating."
As firms become more global,
people are required to exhibit the same behaviours,
and using the same assessment processes can be
a way of achieving this, as long as they are properly
thought out.
Further information on the use
of assessment centres may be obtained from your
HR manager or by contacting Del
Hunter at SSR Personnel Services.
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