Why use an external provider to run your Assessment Centres?

A man stands at a whiteboard in a glass-walled conference room, writing and drawing circular diagrams. Four women are in the room; three are seated at a large table with laptops and mugs, facing the whiteboard, while one woman stands on the right side of the room, smiling.

Why use an external provider to run your Assessment Centres?

Assessment centres have been used to support selection processes since the early 20^th century, originating in military settings but now used across a wide range of industries, organisations, and roles.

An assessment centre is a multi-method, multi-assessor approach to selecting people for roles and identifying development needs. They provide a structured and standardised approach, whereby candidates are put through a series of role-relevant activities and assessed by a variety of trained observers against competencies relevant to the role.

At People Solutions, we have been designing and facilitating assessment centres for 20 years for roles including graduates, apprentices, paramedics, nurses, support workers, call centre operators, customer service representatives, underground miners, drillers’ offsiders, control room technicians, process operators, security personnel, and train drivers, among many others.

One of the conversations we often have with clients during our initial discussions is around whether they should run the process themselves or have an external provider involved from end-to-end.

From a hiring organisation’s point of view, the greatest advantage of running an assessment centre themselves in-house would be the lower cost, as assessment centres can require significant time and resources to deliver effectively.

However, involving an experienced external consultant brings a whole host of benefits including:

Freeing up recruiter/HR time and resources to focus on other parts of the hiring process such as shortlisting, assessing, and reference checks.
Providing best practice oversight when it comes to ensuring the assessment centre is set up appropriately for both candidate fairness and effective assessment.
Supporting the hiring organisation to undertake a job analysis to identify appropriate competencies to assess and to select or design activities that will draw out the behaviours necessary to assess these competencies.
Coordinating and scheduling the day, including managing assessor/candidate conflicts and preparing all materials – this stage takes a lot more time than many people realise or anticipate, and having an external consultant do this can free up significant internal resources.
Making sure assessors are all appropriately trained and maintaining oversight over assessor behaviour and ratings on the day – one of the biggest predictors of making the right selection decisions!
Ensuring smooth and efficient facilitation on the day, creating a better experience for both candidates and assessors.
Facilitating a thorough assessor wrap-up at the end of the day, challenging biased comments or judgements when these come up and supporting assessors to make well informed and objective hiring decisions. This can sometimes be easier for an external consultant to do than an internal recruiter or HR advisor who is conscious of managing their internal relationships with assessors.

If you are currently using or considering using assessment centres as part of your recruitment processes, consider the expertise and resources that you have available and if it might be worth getting support from an external provider to help you run a robust and effective process.