Category Archives: Talent Identification

It’s hard to pick out the most talented people in large organisations – especially in the early stages of their career. This applies when selecting people to join the organisation, and also when spotting internal talent for high potential schemes. The tools that HR have developed to assist in this process are Assessment Centres, manager assessments of potential, and (rarely) self-nomination. This article looks at why there’s a danger of choosing less talented people when using Assessment Centres.

Assessment centres are employed with one precise objective: to be more objective and reliable in assessing talent. Yet many ACs we’ve seen have 2 inherent biases in their design that are rarely discussed. The principle of AC design should be simple. Let’s take an AC designed to pick entry onto a graduate or a high potential scheme.

Assessment Centres are part of many early talent selection processes. Also, Development Centres are often used to direct the development of high talent populations. There are good reasons for this – if you want an accurate and objective picture, a combination of different approaches to assessment has a good correlation with performance a year down the track. But as with all selection and development processes,

There are a variety of ways to track and rate employees – and when it comes to talent we’re usually looking to identify the very high performers and those with high potential. However, one of the problems with this approach is that we tend to assume that if someone is capable of doing a bigger job then they will actually want to do it. However, that may not always be the case…

In this article we’re going to look at something which is too often overlooked when talent planning – that individuals make choices during their careers about how much challenge or stretch they want at a particular point in time.