Assessment Mentor is here to provide training for your upcoming assessment centre. Gain the edge on your competition and secure that graduate contract first time…
Assessment Mentor is here to provide training for your upcoming assessment centre. Gain the edge on your competition and secure that graduate contract first time…
The final hurdle...
Assessment centres, or assessment days, are the most robust way of determining whether you are a suitable fit for the role on offer. Unless you have completed a previous internship in a similar role, the prospective employer faces a significant risk if it gets its hire decision wrong.
Assessment centres therefore subject you to some of the most challenging tests, one after the other, competing directly against a highly able field of rival candidates. In each exercise you will be closely observed by assessors who will make notes and mark up scores throughout.
You can be forgiven if you feel a little intimidated by the assessment centre! With so much riding on the outcome it is important that you prepare comprehensively.
Your main rivals certainly will have.
Understanding your competition
Everyone invited to an assessment centre has already passed a rigorous vetting process which will have involved:
- Review of your CV and predicted degree grade
- Review of your written communication in your online application
- You will have passed online personality and aptitude tests
- Careful review of your recorded video answers (an automated online ‘interview’)
Passing these filters means that everyone being invited to the assessment will be intelligent, highly competent and good communicators – both written and verbal.
Your competition is therefore the elite top level of all applicants that originally applied.
Your chances of receiving an offer
It is typical for an assessment centre being run with 12 candidates to give job offers to 2-3 of them. But it is also not unheard of for an assessment centre to make no offers at all to any of the candidates if none of them meet the standard.
For you to receive an offer you need to succeed in all of the following ways:
- Meet an overall minimum scoring requirement
- Not have a low score on a particularly important dimension of the scoring criteria
- Be better than the vast majority of the other candidates
- Be seen to be a good fit for the team in the location you would work in
- Not have any deal-breaking negative indicators
Falling down on just one of these important criteria will very likely mean you will be notified that your application has been rejected.
How to maximise your chances
Is there a secret to beating the other candidates? Is there some hidden formula or trick? Yes and no, as Assessment Mentor’s Greg King explains:
I wouldn’t say that there is some secret formula to beating the other candidates. Solid research, robust preparation and practice are essential components.
If there is a trick then it is in not having blind spots in your preparation and avoiding common misunderstandings of what is expected of you.
A blind spot can lead to you inadvertently making a deal-breaker mistake which can cost you the role.
Greg has been an assessor for over 15 years within the corporate financial services industry. Over that time he has assessed for various graduate contract positions and internships and has a deep understanding of the profile of a successful candidate.
Over his years of assessing Greg has been frequently surprised that very often it is not necessarily the ‘best’ individuals who get the job offer:
I have seen many candidates who are excellent all-rounders but who let themselves down in what to me are obvious areas. Excellent candidates often have a habit of underestimating the assessment centre, and as an assessor this is always pretty sad to observe.
There is a big difference between a highly talented and competent candidate and one that is actually successful at winning the position…
Robust preparation
Preparing effectively requires two things – effort and the right tools.
You should invest serious effort in preparing for your assessment centre. If you think of all the years of effort you have out in to your studies then the effort you put into preparing for the assessment centre is trivial in comparison.
The effort you should invest in your preparation includes:
So what resources can you draw upon in your preparation?
There are various sources of information and tips to be found on the internet to help with your preparation for the assessment centre. However, many are brief and do not tell you all you need to know.
Our Assessment Centre Masterclass is the most comprehensive resource available for your preparation.
It is made up of video tutorials given by Greg King, an assessor with 15 years of experience. It also includes reference and practice resources to fully equip you to succeed.
One of the resources included in the Masterclass is the Interview Question Bank…
Introducing the Interview Question Bank
The interview is the most challenging part of the assessment centre and presents the danger of leaving you completely compromised if you are not fully prepared.
Included within the Masterclass, it is also available for purchase as a separate stand-alone document.
The IQB will prevent you being caught off guard in the interview. Available for purchase for £19, the Bank includes:
- A valuable respository of the questions most likely to be asked in an Assessment Centre interview - DON'T BE CAUGHT OUT!
- Includes traditional, competency and strengths based questions
- Includes estimation and logical reasoning challenges with well explained solutions and strategies for answering
- PLUS the best questions to ask the interviewer!
Get your copy of the Interview Question Bank FREE!
Sign up to our mailing list and we will send you a voucher code to give you FREE access to our IQB!
Once you have hit subscribe, we will email you your voucher code which you can use during checkout to give you a 100% discount!
By joining our mailing list you are accepting our terms and conditions on the use of our site. We do not send many emails but would like to notify you of any major changes in the assessment centre landscape, and alert you to any special offer we may decide to introduce from time to time.
More about the Assessment Centre Masterclass video course
The Masterclass consists of 13 video tutorials which will prepare you to score highly in the exercises you will face at the assessment centre.
It covers everything you need in one place and takes the stress and effort out of trawling the internet for tips and not knowing if there are gaping holes in your research.
It also covers many other essentials you need to know to get the edge over your competition. It will explain what the assessors are looking for, how you are scored, how to condition yourself on the day, how deal with nerves, and how the hire decision is made.
This is the most comprehensive preparation resource available to candidates.
- Presented by an experienced assessor
- Includes sample exercises and marking schemes
- Includes a reminder cheat sheet, and on the day checklist
- Professionally produced video course
- FREE - Interview Question Bank included!
What our past grads say...
