Assessment Centres - Practice Makes Perfect?

Many students worry about what will happen in a job interview, but increasingly the key phase of the selection process for many UK companies is the Assessment Centre. Usually only offered to candidates who have passed the initial stages of selection, such as an online application form or a telephone interview, assessment centres are a longer event, typically lasting one or possibly more days.

Elements that tend to be included in an assessment centre are:

• Psychometric tests
• Group discussion exercises
• E-tray or in tray prioritisation exercises
• Business case studies
• Presentations
• In-depth interviews

Candidates are under fairly intense scrutiny and are often very aware of competing each other, which may lead to some rather unnatural behaviour. According to careers advisers, some of the phrases that indicate successful performance are:  speaking up (without being unduly dominant), taking a lead, "building" on the contributions of others, keeping an eye on time, analysing facts, facilitating, awareness of the 'big picture'. Much of this focus is on how people work together in teams so it may be worth studying something about group dynamics in business situations.

But nothing beats having a try! Many careers services are now offering practice sessions on Assessment Centres to students and the University of Cumbria is no exception. On 13th November, we plan to run two practice assessment centres in collaboration with Enterprise Rent-a-Car at our Lancaster campus (exact location to be confirmed).  Priority will be offered to students from the New Business School but a large number of places will be available, so watch your student globals at the start of next session.

If you can't wait until then, here are a couple of links to help you gen up on the subject of Assessment Centres:

http://www.diigo.com/user/uoccareers/assessment

http://www.prospects.ac.uk/interview_tips_assessment_centres.htm

Enjoy!

Employers Try New Assessment Tactics

Following a recent post on the dissatisfaction of applicants with their experience of psychometric testing, it was interesting to read in "Graduate Recruiter" that Barclays Capital have moved towards using an online business simulation exercise during their half day assessment centre programme.

The exercise aims to test candidates' responses to realistic work situations using an interactive tool which feeds them information from a variety of sources, rather in the manner of the old 'in-tray' type exercise, complete with deadlines, distractions and last minute changes.

Meanwhile GCHQ have had the innovative idea of asking potential applicants to crack a code on an anonymous website and publicising the event on blogs, twitter, youtube and other social media.  Those who successfully cracked the code without hacking the site illegally could access details of the code source as well as current employment opportunities with GCHQ.

Apparently this campaign attracted 94 million hits, a record for a recruitment website. However, only 236 people succeeded in cracking the code. Presumably at least some of them are by now working for GCHQ.