In recruitment, everything starts with a need. Whether it is a replacement for an employee following a departure, a new position or a transfer, the process to follow is dense. It begins with a crucial step: the analysis of this need in terms of expected skills and workload. This essential phase allows the missions of the position to be (re)defined, as well as the exact profile sought by the company. It is often at this point that the recruiter asks two main questions: how to recruit and how to evaluate?

 
Recruiting is not enough, it is also a question of evaluating skills

In today’s tight job market, the question that keeps coming up is more about recruitment strategy. However, knowing how to recruit is not necessarily enough. Especially for experienced profiles, it is also a question of knowing how to evaluate: how to assess the degree of mastery of the skills acquired by a candidate during his or her professional career?

Indeed, recruiting does not mean looking for the perfect candidate. The success of your recruitment process also depends on your ability to prioritize the essential skills from those that are complementary.

To do this, you need a clear vision of the tasks entrusted to the proposed position, as well as a medium-term perspective of the possibilities for development in the position in question. It is then a question of approaching the notion of the individual’s potential.

In order to assess the candidate’s skills, the latter must be able to deploy his or her know-how and interpersonal skills. These different professional dimensions are difficult to probe in depth during a face-to-face interview.

The benefits of role-playing for recruiting

To directly assess a person’s skills, there is nothing better than a situation. For example, most companies expect a manager to be able to unite his team around individual and/or collective objectives.

How do you evaluate a candidate on these dimensions? Ask them during an interview, do a reference check with their former employers… All of this can give you clues as to the degree of mastery of this specific managerial skill.

However, to be sure, the best way is to observe the employee doing it. What are the assessment exercises by professional situation? The principle is simple and pragmatic, it is about putting the candidate “in action”.

Through simulation exercises, the candidate will work to achieve an operational objective and respond to certain instructions. This allows us to examine the candidate’s natural reactions.

Depending on your objectives, the simulation can take place in your world or in an unusual context for the individual. Taking the assessor out of his or her comfort zone is an excellent way to gauge his or her abilities, not his or her automatisms.

The use of role-playing in recruitment is becoming more and more widespread today. Role plays are no longer reserved for technical skills.

They allow us to discover various behavioral characteristics of the person being evaluated: capacity for analysis, synthesis, judgment, global vision and managerial style, etc.

In addition, simulation exercises are now much more elaborate and the assessors are seasoned professionals. From now on, all recruiters can consider using simulation to get a precise idea of the level of expertise of a future employee.

The Assessment Center’s methodology

The Assessment or Development Center are methodologies that use a professional situation. The objective is to carry out a precise diagnosis of the strengths and areas for improvement of a candidate or employee.

In the context of recruitment, this stage enables the company to advise on a suitable integration plan for the individual’s personality and skills. Also, having a global vision of talent is essential to prepare a new organisation within a company. In the case of internal mobility, the assessment includes specific recommendations on a development plan.

GO FURTHER …