The Keller Consulting Group provides Assessment Center design and implementation based on your needs utilizing real management problems and issues within your agency.
Strangely enough an assessment center is not a place, but it is a process. More than one technique is utilized to evaluate applicants, and the techniques can include such activities as: in-basket exercises, press conferences, management tasks, group presentations, speeches, interviewing, and written exercises (Galvin and Hamilton 1975).
Needless to say, the assessment center is unique and easily distinguished from traditional selection examinations in the following ways:
1. The technique is situationally-based and the process is custom-designed. Job analysis and terminal performance objectives are fundamental to the preparation of exercises.
2. The process is more time consuming that the normal civil service examination.
3. This type of testing is multiphasic in as much as a variety of methods and instruments are utilized to measure job-related skills, knowledge, and abilities.
4. The process encourages self-discovery, because every candidate is provided with feedback on actual performance.
5. Candidates prefer the assessment center over other selection methods.
6. There is an enhancement of reliability and validity in identifying and measuring human traits (Driggs and Whisenand, 1976).
Individuals vary in abilities, skills, and personal qualities which they possess. Jobs also vary in abilities, skills, and personal qualities which they require of an individual to successfully perform that job. Thus, it is important to match the candidate against the prerequisites of the job.
Assessment centers are one technique for determining this match. As stated previously, assessment centers are a process in which individuals participate in a variety of job related exercises.
These exercises try to stimulate the basic situations which an individual would face in placed in a specific job thereby determining how that person would behave in a particular position. Thus, assessment centers processes are based on the assumption that past behavior can be used to predict future actions. That is, a person’s behavior is a simulated job-related exercise would be the same or very similar in an actual on-the-job situation (More and Unsinger 1987).
