Applicants grab chance to shine

By ANGELA McCARTHY

Have you applied for a job and wished for more ways of proving your skills than the CV and interview?

Increasingly, job applicants - especially those seeking call centre work - are put to the test in "assessment centres".

Despite the title, assessment centres are not specialised high-tech centres with lie detectors and the like.

Rather, they're a selection of customised tasks that can be done almost anywhere, and include role plays, presentations, simulated job tasks and group exercises - all a reflection of what people would do in the job.

And they're no doddle, as I realised while watching six people pitching for Bank of New Zealand contact centre jobs do exercises to assess their speaking, listening, problem-solving and negotiation skills.

Each candidate had to represent a different point of view on how the company should organise a social event - and then reach consensus.

The exercise is one of four designed by TMP Worldwide's Auckland office specifically for BNZ call centre roles.

The six unfortunates read, fidgeted and took notes before launching into their discussion. A scribe sitting behind each candidate impassively wrote down his or her every comment and gesture. They recorded, classified, made judgments.

The BNZ assessors are a mix of BNZ management and TMP Worldwide consultants.

They do three days of training with six-monthly updates, says TMP Worldwide consultant and registered psychologist Anne-Marie Prescott. Also, in regular audits, one assessor ghosts another and vice versa.

TMP's assessment centres incorporate trait-based and task-based exercises, so measurements are by multiple means.

I felt for the applicants, under pressure to perform with the assessors' eyes drilling into their backs.

Candidates' personalities emerged. The pushy stood out as much as the tentative, the onlooker as much as the entertainer.

In a role-play, assessors noted how candidates handled phone calls, judging everything from voice clarity to responsiveness.

The job hunters also had a tour of the call centre, a personal interview and a psychometric assessment - a test based on psychological principles which aims to judge the fit of a personality to a job.

It seemed daunting, but Neisha Voot, TMP consultant and registered psychologist, says the experience is useful for job seekers and employers.

Centres offer job seekers plenty of opportunities to show off their skills, even those without a track record in an industry, but with strong transferable skills. All six candidates could be offered jobs if they "strongly display the targeted competencies", says Voot.

FX Consultants director Stewart Forsyth says the main advantage of assessment centres is the chance to "try the job and get a feel for some of the critical incidents or moments of truth that the [tests] stimulate".

Prescott, who has been designing assessment centres for TMP for four years, says centres also highlight the gaps in people's skills - which helps companies organise appropriate training.

Assessment centres "give organisations faith in knowing how and what people can do, and how much support they need".

BNZ head of sales and services, Shona Bishop, has been using assessment centres for four years and the staff-finding success rate is undeniably attractive - about 99 per cent.

"The important thing is that the assessment centre is designed for our environment and needs," says Bishop. "It also looks at the EQ [emotional intelligence] factor and gives everyone a chance to prove themselves. I think it's a very fair, comprehensive process."

Jolyon Allen, an organisational psychologist for Allen & Allen, says assessment centres efficiently measure a number of candidates in a short time.

Group exercises are the most complex to set up, he says, but offer the most valuable insight into people's persuasiveness and attitude to teamwork.

Putting candidates through a half-day or day's assessment may seem expensive, Allen says, but it is outlay-effective given the high cost of recruitment.

In a survey for an article in the New Zealand Journal of Psychology last June, 10 to 14 per cent of 100 large organisations and 37 per cent of 30 recruitment consultancies said that they used assessment centres.