Assessment & Development Centers

The first Assessment Center I have led in Romania was back in 1999. The client-company was a multinational FMCG organization entering the market and aiming to ensure best recruitment results by involving all candidates for management positions in an extensive Assessment Center. The purpose of the Assessment Center was Recruitment at that time. Combining competency-based interviews with role-plays, case studies, presentations, mixed testing procedures, personality profiles, critical incident interviews, in-tray exercises, we have jointly built up a management team that was probably the most stable team for more than a decade in the market (some of the managers recruited and assessed back then are still with the company – in Romania or abroad -, others – most of them – have progressed into general management roles).

In the following years I succeeded to create a unique assessment model with tools that are 100% customized for the client’s Assessment Center purpose. The purposes became of large variety:

• Assessment Center for recruitment purposes
• Assessment Center for identifying training and development needs
• Assessment Center for succession planning and internal promotion (identifying internal successors for the manager of a team / department / company or persons to move into new and more demanding roles)
• Assessment Center for identifying potential, focusing on identifying or verifying “fast track” candidates from within the organization
• Last, but not least, market economy and circumstances have led to more recent Assessment Centers for Restructuring – Retention / Redundancy

Not being a certified assessor per se, allowed me and my team to customize the Assessment Centers even more. Today there is no single ‘off-the-shelf’ tool we are using in an Assessment Center. Every one and single Assessment Center is fully adapted to the client’s purpose, industry, request, expectation, need for deliverables, structure design, etc. What we design for a client can seldom be used by or for another client. All related assessment materials are being handed over to the client company after the Assessment Center and become its in-house assessment tool.

• We work with assessed individuals on a one-to-one basis and do not encourage group assessments
• We allow 1-3 days for the assessment of an individual and subsequently provide a full report for both parties – to the client who asked for the assessment and feed-back to the assessed individual
• We are able to run the Assessment Centers and provide the reports in three languages: Romanian, English and German
• We customize every tool to meet the specificity of the client-company
• Success has been measured by obtaining positive feed-back from both parties, even if the process has often been difficult and input given not always ‘nice to hear’, we made sure that everybody involved felt to have moved a step forward
• We are always open, even happy to include standard company assessment tools into our assessment centers and cross-check results
• We manage implementation of follow-up decisions related to the results of the Assessment Center and assume responsibility for accurate feed-back
• We have assessed managers from a variety of industries: FMCG, pharmaceutical companies, construction materials, insurance & financial services, IT & Telco, services industries, etc.
• Please also note the potential downside of an Assessment Program with us: as mentioned above, we have no own certified tools whatsoever, the single certified tools come from companies we are sub-contracting for psychological testing!