Considerations for Running Assessment Centres 

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Recruitment Process Outsourcing is an asset to recruitment teams and their campaigns across the hiring world, but when it comes to Assessment Centres, the benefits of RPO becomes even more pronounced. 

Assessment Centres (AC) are a resource-heavy recruitment stage with many nuances to consider, Amberjack explores the top three advantages of RPO in AC fulfilment. 

Showcasing Your Organisation 

One of the first, and most important, considerations when running your Assessment Centres is how effectively you are showcasing your organisation. Showcasing your organisation and employees well makes it easier to attract and engage potential candidates, especially those from Early Careers backgrounds, who are looking for employers to kickstart their careers. 

Whether or not the events are hosted virtually or in person, making proceedings engaging, realistic, and representative of your brand is critical to ensuring that incoming candidates have accurate expectations and encourages trust. 

Creating engaging communications, particularly critical in the digital space, is an important part of representing your organisation in an engaging way that showcases what your company has to offer. This is an area that RPO specialists like Amberjack have expertise in. The careful planning and designing of Assessment Centre and Attraction materials is necessary to both fill your Assessment Centres with candidates that show potential and keep them engaged on the day. 

Candidate Engagement 

There are numerous things to think about when it comes to candidate engagement and organising Assessment Centres. 

Where possible, it is recommended to allow candidates to book into a choice of AC dates and provide confirmation via a media channel of their choice. The ability to choose between dates for their AC provides a level of respect and consideration which makes an impact on candidates and their experience and increases the likelihood that they will attend. 

Perhaps one of the most influential ways to not only engage your candidates but help them through your process is providing coaching calls. If virtual, these calls enable your candidates to check that they can access the tech and systems required to participate in the AC and provide an overview of what to expect on the day itself. In these calls you should include things like start and end times, when they can expect feedback and results, and the chance for the candidate to ask any questions. Amberjack provides coaching calls on behalf of a variety of our clients; as an extension of your in-house recruitment team, we work to put candidates at ease and supply them with everything they need to know for a smooth Assessment Centre and expectation of your organisation. 

Finally, your communications are an important factor in your candidate engagement strategies. While your in-house team might not have the time and resources available, keep warm emails, good luck texts, and other comms are critical to engaging with your candidates to make sure they are comfortable attending their AC. This is where Amberjack can help, with easily scalable solutions, our team can enable your team to focus on the most important tasks by outsourcing your communications. 

Assessors and Facilitators 

Lastly, if your organisation is having a hard time securing availability of hiring managers for Assessment Centres, then recruitment process outsourcing might be a key consideration in your strategy. 

RPO providers like Amberjack can help by utilising our assessors and facilitators, as many or as little as required, to cover gaps and ensure that every candidate is assessed thoroughly. 

Additionally, we are able to provide the assessment design and carry out the assessing itself to free up even more of your hiring manager and HR team’s time and resources to focus on BAU. With the flexibility of RPO, you can use anything from as little as a couple of assessors, to outsourcing your whole assessment and selection process. 

Why RPO Might Be Right for You 

While intuitively, keeping assessment centre management, facilitation and assessing in house may feel like the right thing to do as candidates reach the final stage of the process; if lack of resource internally is going to compromise the overall candidate experience of such a critical part of their journey, then it is definitely worth considering all the benefits that an RPO set up can bring.  

At Amberjack, we take great pride in truly understanding your brand and tone of voice so that we are genuinely working as part of your team. Whether it be ensuring that the Assessment Centre is truly setting you apart from other organisations in terms of branded information packs provided to the candidate ahead of the assessment centre, detailed coaching calls, or engaging welcome sessions, and facilitation and assessing on the day itself – we will ensure that the candidate experience is first class, so that regardless of the outcome for the candidate they have had a really positive experience and your brand will be held in high regard.  

If you are struggling to make the above a reality within your teams, please do speak to us – we’d love to understand your pressure points and support you in creating great experiences for you and your candidates.  

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