Assessment Center

The assessment center as an instrument for personnel selection and development has a firm place in the professional world today. The instrument of personnel diagnostics has been empirically examined many times in science and practice like hardly any other. Its validity has been proven many times over, and its usefulness has been confirmed by various utility models. International and national expert groups have developed standards for the optimal design and use of assessment centres. The positive experiences with quality-enhancing efforts in the assessment center area provide indications of how processes and decisions in the entire talent management can be empirically examined for their effectiveness and optimized.

Certification alone is not enough

In a chain of decisions, starting with the recruitment and selection of applicants, an assessment center alone does not guarantee success: Other, weaker links in the chain can destroy the diagnostic added value of an assessment. If, for example, the right candidates are not sent to the assessment center, or if the results are not used adequately for further decisions or are even bypassed in a decision-making process, the best assessment quality is of no help.

In today's human resources management, most decisions before and after an assessment center are not nearly as well analyzed and transparent as the assessment center itself. Assessments of potential by superiors, which lead to a candidate being sent to an assessment center, are not very well researched in terms of accuracy and assessment errors, let alone secured by a quality label. There has also been little research into what an assessment centre result does to a candidate, what decisions and motivations it triggers and what development steps actually follow. This would need to be systematically tracked. Investments in measures for the development of employees are often made without a well-founded basis for decision-making about the effectiveness or the return on investment - and this despite the fact that in many companies today personnel costs account for far more than half of the total costs and the value added contribution of this cost share is becoming increasingly important. What are the prerequisites for such professionalization? What can we learn in this respect from the strong chain link of the assessment center? In the following, we address five central prerequisites.

1. fairs, fairs, fairs

Before anything can be controlled and improved, it must be measured. Just as in the assessment center the observations and assessments are recorded in detail per observer, dimension and exercise and recorded numerically, data must also be increasingly collected in the talent chain. The first prerequisite for this is an understanding of the need and the corresponding mental orientation towards empiricism. Soft factors can also be measured much better than they might seem at first glance. This is less a matter of external assessments and more a matter of direct data collection at employee level. Examples can be found at Google, for example, where a wide range of data on employees and support measures are systematically collected and analysed (see Davenport et al., 2010).

2. cross-divisional and cross-company standards

Only when metrics and processes are standardized can reliable data be collected that can then be systematically analyzed and translated into fruitful action. For example, inconsistent performance appraisals of employees across divisions and supervisors do not allow for a review of the correlation between performance appraisals and salary. If engagement is surveyed differently every year, and with tools such as company-specific questionnaires, it is impossible to compare with external benchmarks or analyze progression, let alone draw conclusions from individual engagement to business success.

Just as company-neutral standards are developed for assessment centres and enforced by means of quality labels, there must also be more standards for performance appraisals, for engagement surveys or for reviewing the effectiveness of development measures. Standards here mean: clearly defined measurement variables with assessment criteria, minimum requirements for the quality and process of the measurement procedures, documentation and disclosure of the results, as well as specifications for the empirical evaluation of the effectiveness or its validity and reliability.

3. benefit and impact analyses

Only if the impact of assessments and decisions on business-relevant variables is tracked - for example, by comparing a hiring decision with the subsequent level of performance or the length of time a candidate stays with a company - can the validity of this decision be recorded as precisely as the diagnostic statements of an assessment center. Today, there are only a few companies that systematically track newly hired employees in terms of their job satisfaction and performance, and thus analyze the quality of the recruiting process. As a rule, neither the recruitment decisions are documented in a comprehensible way, nor is job satisfaction measured in a reliable and standardized way.

4. regular neutral reviews

If clear standards are defined for selected components of a talent management system, their compliance must be guaranteed through transparent reviews. This is the only way to achieve a step-by-step improvement in quality. For human resources management, this also results in the additional benefit of being able to present management decision-makers with a convincing benchmark and thus increase acceptance for its instruments and programs. Thus - again analogous to the assessment center - quality reviews with corresponding quality labels could be developed for the implementation of management development programs or recruitment procedures.

5. set benchmarks and learn from the best

Data and information can only be interpreted correctly and translated into actions if they are related to a reference value. Benchmarks allow a systematic comparison both within the company and with other companies, providers or instruments. In the assessment center, the creation of standards and numerous surveys and publications have created a transparency that allows every assessment center provider or user to compare quality and results with others and to orient themselves to benchmarks. In the talent chain, for example, employee surveys should be designed to allow comparisons with other companies: This is the only way to interpret a company's engagement scores correctly, and the only way to learn from the best.

First steps in the right direction

It is becoming apparent that the above demands are increasingly falling on receptive ears in the industry. The call for talent management or human capital management based on systematically collected facts and not just intuition is growing louder. Already, the first companies have set up human capital analytics teams that regularly and systematically analyze human capital and the investments made in its development. In 2013, a new journal is planned: "Evidence-based HRM", and there are also initial approaches to the development of a standard for human capital metrics (www.centerfortalentreporting. org).

In order for the above measurement and analysis to take place in a coordinated and efficient manner, a strategy or framework for human capital analysis is needed. The European Foundation for Quality Management or the Human Capital Institute propose such frameworks. This holistic view makes it possible to ask the right questions and calculate key figures that show a company what is already being done well in the individual areas, where data is still missing or which links in the talent chain need to be developed even more. Such frameworks also form the basis for cross-company definitions of metrics, for standardizing procedures, and for building benchmarks. The example of quality assurance in the area of the assessment center will set a precedent in favor of stable, transparent and comparable processes across the entire talent development chain.