The Customer
National Construction Company
The Brief:
This company recruits a number of graduates and industrial placement students each year, across various professional disciplines. As part of the strategy to ensure it is fully equipped with trainees, it also links with universities and offers a number of student sponsorship programmes. They asked VT Methven for assistance in planning assessment centres to ensure effective selection of graduate trainees and industrial placement students.
Meeting Challenges / Overcoming Barriers:
The main challenges were related to logistics. VT Methven worked with and trained internal personnel to assess 60 candidates from several disciplines over the period of a week.
The Approach:
The involvement of their staff was key. VT Methven trained a team of observers and assessors. A ‘mock’ assessment centre was run to aid familiarity with the recording and standardised scoring systems. Assessors appreciated the dry run which highlighted the importance of accurate recording, and the ability to feed-back observed behaviours, marked against a given core competency. Psychometric profiling, practical team exercises, structured interviews and a company work related presentation were incorporated.