So you have got down to your shortlist of three candidates for that role as a Junior Planner. All have a can-do attitude and have expressed a willingness to learn. Two seem very confident and therefore come across as competent. They present well, and whilst the third candidate seems to have more experience, she’s quieter and a bit more reserved, so you just aren’t sure. Sound familiar?
This is a problem that we have all faced at sometime or other and is exactly why we developed the Numensa Assessment Centre. Could the confident candidates really do what they say they can, or are they over-selling their experience or abilities? Or, could the quieter candidate be under-selling herself?
We poured decades of our experience into developing comprehensive standardised testing for anyone working in merchandise management. The purpose of the assessments is to benchmark a person’s knowledge and skills against those required at differing job levels.
Clients have used the assessments for recruitment, to better understand and benchmark their current teams’ skill levels, and we have even had people use the assessment to better understand their own skill-gaps when looking to get promoted to the next level.
There are three levels of tests, Entry, Intermediate and Advanced and two streams, buying and merchandise planning, making six tests in all. Each test contains three different components, Knowledge, Excel and Skills. Of course nothing is foolproof, but having a standardised assessment certainly gives one more confidence in making that final decision. And so what happened with our three potential Junior Planners? Well they each undertook the Intermediate Planning Assessment, one of the very confident applicants turned out to have a very inflated view of her capabilities, the other was pretty accurate, but the stand-out scoring much higher than both, was the quieter, more reticient candidate.
For more information about the Assessment Centre…