Claire Parkin
My name is Claire Parkin. I head up the Assessment Services team at TMP Worldwide. The Assessment Services team is a real mix of people. We have 11 people in the team; come from a variety of different backgrounds which I think is one of our real strengths. So we have Chartered Occupational Psychologists; we have HR Professionals some of whom have come from in-house roles working for what is now the client; some who have worked in different consultancies and we also have Project Managers as well.
The Assessment Services team offer a really broad range of services; so I will group them together to try and make sense of it. Where we tend to start is actually understanding the role that our client is looking to recruit so we’ll undertake job analysis and job profiling interviews where we really try and uncover the behaviours and the skills that candidates will need in order to succeed in that role.
What we do then is take that data and turn it into a competency model that really sets out those behaviours and skills in the core competency areas. What we then do is go on to design a recruitment process. Sometimes we’ll design a full end to end recruitment process that incorporates tests such as Situational Judgment Tests, Competency Based Telephone Interviews, Psychometric Tests going all the way through to assessment centres we design as well.
We then also help our clients in the delivery of those assessment centres so we work with a really large pool of trained assessors and we provide administrative assessors, facilitators and role-players to the client to run their assessment centres for them. We also sometimes train our clients to be assessors themselves. Sometimes it’s quite nice for their line managers to be involved in the recruitment process and we run that assessor training for them. We also run competency based interview training as well.
And the final area we tend to work in the development sphere and what we do is design development centres; so looking at internal candidates that might be looking to progress their career internally or might be looking for their next promotion; and we put them through development centres where we really try and see where their strengths are; see where their development areas are and help them in terms of progressing their career.